New Delhi: A creator can build an audience without owning a factory, warehouse or physical store. Turning that audience into a product business is different. Once a creator decides to put a T-shirt, hoodie or another physical product behind their name, someone has to make it, store it, pack it and deliver it.
As creator businesses mature, some are looking beyond advertising, brand partnerships and affiliate income toward products they can sell directly to their audiences. That is becoming a more relevant business question as India’s creator economy grows.
A 2026 study by the Indian School of Business and Hashfame estimates that India’s creator base grew from 0.96 million in 2020 to 4.12 million in 2025. It also describes a creator economy that has become more geographically distributed, while pointing to sustainable monetisation as a challenge for the next stage of the ecosystem.
Qikink Is Building for That Gap
Founded in 2016, Qikink is operated under the legal entity Huepress Fashion Private Limited, and provides print-on-demand, dropshipping and fulfilment services for online sellers. The company says it now serves more than 25,000 brands, producing goods only after an order is placed rather than requiring sellers to hold finished stock in advance.
That model addresses a decision every product business faces before it gets off the ground: how much to make, without knowing whether it will sell. Producing too many items can leave unsold stock. Producing too little can limit the opportunity. For an established apparel business, this is a routine planning problem. For a creator testing whether an audience will buy a product, it can be a substantial and unfamiliar commitment that most individual creators are not set up to absorb.
Qikink is now applying that same production model to creators, through a product it calls Creator Store, aimed at people who may already have the audience needed to introduce a product but not the manufacturing, fulfilment or technical setup needed to sell one.
How Creator Store Works
Through Qikink’s Creator Store, a creator selects products, adds their own designs and publishes a storefront without having to build or manage the underlying ecommerce and fulfilment infrastructure themselves. There is no inventory to buy upfront and no manufacturing setup to arrange. When an order is placed, Qikink handles the printing, packing, and delivery for creators, and they earn from each sale without having carried any stock or production cost to get there.
The creator still decides what to sell, how the product fits their identity and how to introduce it to their audience. What changes is that the physical product does not have to be manufactured and stored simply because a creator wants to test an idea. Production follows an actual order rather than a forecast of how much stock might sell.
Sivaraman S., founder of Qikink, said, “Creators have already built an audience around their content and ideas. The next step is being able to build products around that audience without taking on inventory before they know what will sell. We have been solving that production problem through print-on-demand, and Creator Store brings the same model to creators.”
Extending an Existing Model to a New Audience
Creator Store extends an operating model Qikink has built for online sellers since 2016. The company started by addressing the production and inventory requirements involved in selling physical products online; its move into creator commerce applies the same infrastructure to people who may begin with a community rather than a product catalogue.
For creators, selling merchandise does not necessarily mean taking on every function of a traditional product company. Manufacturing, packing and delivery can remain with a fulfilment partner, while the creator works on the product, the identity around it and the audience that may buy it – whether that’s a YouTuber launching merch or a niche community backing a smaller drop. The ISB and Hashfame study points to sustainable, long-term monetisation as the next challenge for India’s creator economy, one that goes beyond brand deals and one-off sponsorships.
Creator Store is the newest addition to Qikink’s broader positioning as an Indian print-on-demand and dropshipping platform serving more than 25,000 brands, extending infrastructure built for ecommerce sellers to a new set of entrepreneurs who are starting with an audience instead of a warehouse.
