Transcript
Speaker: How does India buy pants? Typically own 12 to 15 pairs of pants in their wardrobe. E-Wice in India itself is like a half a billion dollar company. It's primarily men's jeans.
Speaker: Men and women have fundamentally different shopping habits. 80% of Indian men buy just five colors of pants. Dhruv Toshniwal built a 120-kloor business on the thesis that men don't want more choices, they want a better fit. And on this episode of the Founder Thesis podcast, he talks about why he's betting that one brand and one product while everyone around him chases more.
Speaker: Dhrubh Toshniwal, you are the founder of the Pant Project. Welcome to the Founder Thesis podcast. um I want to start by understanding the market. ah How do Indians buy pants?
Speaker: What are the various categories of players? Great question, Akshay. Thanks for having me on the pod. We've, ah as a family, been in the apparel business 50 years, and it's been an export and domestic focused, vertically integrated mill, yarn, fabric, and garments. And we've really observed over the years how consumers buy and how those preferences are changing over time too.
Speaker: And I've had to break down the India pants market, and you know that's something we've thought about a lot. Our brand is called The Pant Project. Pants is literally the only and main thing that we sell pants of all kinds. And India is a massive country, you know, growing young population. Everyone is super bullish in the India consumer story. ah But if I to simplify, you know, men's pants within the universe of apparel, I would say it's one of the stickiest categories in... apparel.
Speaker: It's one that men buy on comfort first. So our understanding of the category is top wear might be logo first. You may want to show today you're wearing a Rye Florant and tomorrow. Lacoste, but in pants, if they're uncomfortable, they ruin your day. And comfort is the first thing you're looking for. ah So comfort is the number one reason people buy the pan project and fit fabric functionality sort of give you that comfort. I think when you ask how India buys too, the Indian consumer, especially the younger, digital native savvy consumer is buying things because they discovered a brand through Instagram ads or Facebook ads. And it's something they can relate to. So an Indian consumer is looking for a brand that feels young, that feels fresh. that feels like it's something they can relate to. And that's, you know, in times true to, when you talk about the time. Give me a, like a more data database thing. Now, but what you're telling me is the, the, the story you tell to your investors. Yeah. But like, what does the data say? For example, yeah how big is an organized market compared to organized market? In organized market, are there like, say, budget discounted brand and are there premium brands and are there like, whatever, who's playing in which market? You know, those things I'd love to understand.
Speaker: Yeah, sure. I had to give you some data on the Indian parents market. ah It's ah firstly a largely offline first market. So while online is growing 80% of the market is still today offline first. This would be because you want to check the fit.
Speaker: Yeah, and touch and feel in apparel is so important. You want to try the color, fit, see the fabric. ah So touch and feel is is super important. I think India obviously is much bigger at the value segment than the premium segment. So the some thousand rupee apparent market is ah many times bigger than the a mid-premium market, which I would say is like $1,500 to $2.5k a pant. And the premium market is pretty small, ah like the $3,000, $3.5k plus ah pair of pants. If you had to ask about how many pants someone buys, you know our research tells us a man who typically own 12 to 15 pairs of pants in their wardrobe.
Speaker: ah This could be across all categories, you know formal, smart, casuals, jeans, shorts, joggers, literally any type of bottom wear. And a man would typically keep a pair of pants for three to five years. So he's buying you know three to five pants a year.
Speaker: um Bottom wear as a percentage of apparel wardrobe spend is like 35%, 65% is top wear. What's interesting there though Akshay is while top wear is 2x larger than bottom wear as a category, top wear is like 200x more competitive. I mean, anyone starting up just takes that same logic and says, oh, you buy more shirts than pants, so let's start a shirting brand. And what we thought is like, okay, everyone is thinking that way. Why don't we think a little differently? No one is focused on the pant. They want to first sell you a suit or a shirt. And then the pant is an afterthought, like, oh, with the shirt, buy this pant. We said, why we bring the afterthought to the forefront and be a pants-first company? You know, and interesting thing also is pants is a similar category to innerwear.
Speaker: uh it's actually the closest to everything we said is closest to jockey as a business uh in terms of fit to being the most important reason that people buy it ah i think the difference only between pants and innerwear would be that innerwear is maybe more frequently purchased but a lower order value uh pants is a little bit less frequently purchased maybe two to three times a year men like to buy in bulk so men will typically go into a store uh spend 20-25 minutes and consider it successful if they never have to go back for six months and they've done their shopping for the entire season So men are convenience based with purchasers and it's like always need driven. I need them for office or my brother's getting married or like I'm going on holiday. It's not that much impulse purchasing even in malls, you know, even in malls, people are mainly coming into a store.
Speaker: because they need something. Okay, interesting. And how much of this market is unbranded versus branded? Yeah, we've done some research around this. ah Firstly, there's a large part of the market.
Speaker: It's a smaller part every day, but that's over-the-counter fabrics. especially in tier two India, the most common way to stitch a pair of pants is go buy a thang, like old school thang of fabric and go to your local tailor and get it stitched. That itself is a multiple billion dollar market. You know, you know OTC fabrics itself was like a 10,000 crore plus market. Bottomware as a whole for men, our understanding is it's a 40, 50,000 crore market growing at a 10 to 12% Kager. So going to be in 80,000 crore market in the next five years. And it's, you know, while organized sector is growing, it's still an unorganized organized play, especially at the mass price points. In the organized sector, you do have some really, really large brands. So ah in organized retail, I mean, Levi's in India itself, is like a half a billion dollar company uh and it's primarily men's jeans right uh or uh you know aditya villa has a set of brands that together you know four of them being in menswear do like a billion dollars in sales uh so there's some really large men's businesses that have been built even in the premium segment in india At the other end of the spectrum, you have folks like Zulio just opening like 800 physical outlets across the country and doing thousands of crores of revenue in a five-year period at mass price point. So it's a really diverse market. I think India, what's interesting also is it's um many countries in one. And so you ask me how men buy pants. I mean, how men buy pants in the south is very different from the north or the east of India. ah body types vary so much and even taste and style vary so much. But I would say within apparel, men's pants is still one of the narrower categories. ah You know, interesting stat for us is 80% of sales is five colors.
Speaker: And we actually have something internally in Panthberg where it says like BBG can never be on stock. ah BBG is black, blue, gray. ah Men buy black, and blue and grey. And then khaki and olive is like the most fashionable colors men will wear. So black, blue, grey, khaki, olive is like 80% of the fans market. Solids is a much larger part than patterns when it comes to bottom wear. And even when men do patterns in bottom wear, they do a very simple microstructures, herringbones, tweeds, sort of. very simple microstructures as opposed to loud, printed in shirts or graphic in these is massive, but in pants, it tends to be a more core of the wardrobe product.
Speaker: Super interesting. um What got you interested in the pants market? Was it um was Was it like experimenting and saying, okay, this is this seems to be the right way or was it like ah data and studying and like a consultant does?
Speaker: Yeah, a bit of both. I think, ah firstly, always knew I wanted to be an apparel entrepreneur. I think that's where the back-end mode exists. ah Within apparel, we knew we wanted to a category with low inventory risk. Fast fashion is a great way to make money if you do it right.
Speaker: But Hudit and I, my brother and I started the company together and we didn't want to have sleepless nights wondering, is this the season where we miss the trend? Is this the season where we have to do 70% off and mark down inventory? Fast fashion can go underwater really quickly. ah So, you know, we wanted core fashion and pants tends to be a more core category. We also wanted a high loyalty category and pants is a high loyalty category. We want a category that's hard to crack actually. Pant fit is probably um ah harder to crack than fit in most other parts of your wardrobe.
Speaker: And so it was a set of these functions and then obviously market size being massive. I mean, frequency of purchase and average order value being large enough to build a large business. I said it's like a jockey in Inouye, it's also pants is very similar business to sneakers. On Running has built a billion dollar business just selling running shoes. You could argue that the frequency of purchase of running shoes is low and that the average ticket is mid to high. uh i think pants is similar maybe higher frequency than shoes a little bit lower average order value but incredible stickiness like i'm an a6 guy and i just buy a6 every single time my existing pair uh wears out because i know for 10 years that brand just gets my shoe size and you know shoe type and fit like right so we see pants as being that super loyal category you know we've had family members who like have bought color plus for the last 20 years
Speaker: just bought Levi's for like 20 years. And that loyalty is possible in a category like PANs. Okay. Fascinating. How old were you when you started the PAN project?
Speaker: so I was just about turning 30, 29 when I started the PAN project. My brother was 27. I had a mix of professional experience before that. I think my mindset to starting up was, you know, I graduated from Wharton when I was 22, spent four years in my undergrad in Philadelphia. i studied finance had no background wanted to do none and i like numbers uh then i did management consulting at oliver wyman in new york and you know professional experience i thought was important to have because if you're coming back and running a business you know that's helpful context uh i did that for four years like across financial services and New York and Latin America and then came back to India and joined the family business.
Speaker: Spent a couple of years. What is the family business? What's it called? The family business is called Batswara Syntex. It's a 50 years next year. So it started in 1976. And it's a publicly listed company. You know, does about 150 million revenue. And it's something my grandfather built up.
Speaker: You know, my dad, Cha-Cha and Fufa carried forward that legacy and grew that business across three verticals, yarn, fabric, and garment. And it's something Ujit and I were a part of. This is not a consumer business. It's a B2B. It's a hardcore B2B manufacturing business. It's contract manufacturing for brands.
Speaker: you know Their customers are large global and Indian brands. And ah it's a business where there's a lot of innovation on the product development R&D side. But the marketing muscle is B2B sales, where your customer is a large brand and you're not selling one-to-one to a consumer, you're selling one-to-one to want business and that's selling to many consumers. I think that skill set has been something we've had to learn at the PAN project. And the DNA of a D2C and B2B business are like fundamentally different, like chalk and cheese in the way they think. And, you know, we actually tried a couple of brands within the family business before starting the PAN project. And i think the realization we came to is that, you know, anywhere that B2B and D2C have been successful, they've been done under different entities with different organizational DNAs, because the way a manufacturer thinks and the way a brand thinks in terms of investing their dollars is very different. what What went wrong when you tried it within the family business to launch brands?
Speaker: You honestly, wouldn't say anything particularly when, firstly, those two ideas were not as good as the PAN project. so Okay. then office What were those two ideas? One was sustainable clothing, ah like an Everlane for India. This was 2018. It's probably when 2026, probably still too early for like a sustainability first brand in India. Yeah. Maybe 2030, 2035 will be the right time for that. ah The second one was one in you know the wedding wear space. It was mid-premium segment. And we realized there, given our backend, we don't really have any operational moats. And it's a high design business that ah has a high fashion element. We were just uncomfortable with the risk profile of business. constantly having to design new styles. So it's sort of internal learnings where we realized in this journey that ah fundamentally,
Speaker: you know Pants was the third idea we had and happened to stick, but it's also when we realized organizational DNA wise, a manufacturer has to have a certain org structure, which is focused around ah cost optimization to be cost competitive with their a supply base. And ah brand has to have a little bit more courage to spend ad dollars on beta with the belief that that ad dollars will build brand equity, which will convert to P&L in the long term. um I think those two mindsets are hard to do within an existing organization. When you look across large Indian legacy businesses, even like Anandamala Fashioned and Indian or Arraigments, they continue to have manufacturing divisions and brand divisions, but they are completely separate businesses run by separate you know folks with separate DNA and mindset.
Speaker: Okay. So yeah when you kind of decided to start this on your own, ah how much capital did you start with? Yeah, so honestly, we ended up putting more and more capital into the business as we found product pocket fit. ah so you know, we started as a custom-made brand. And the beauty being custom-made is it was negative working capital cycle. And inventory is the number one thing that apparel brands have to fund. And so by negative working capital cycle, I mean, we got paid upfront by our customers. We were an online brand. And we paid our suppliers after, you know, 30, 60 or 90 days of credit. So we had to hold no inventory.
Speaker: How would custom-made pants work online? I mean, to ask good questions you typically need a like a measuring and a fit and all that to happen offline, right?
Speaker: Yeah. ah You know, funny backstory on the brand is we ideated the pant project in 2019 and 2020 pre-COVID.
Speaker: We signed a physical retail store in Kalagoda, which was to open in April and like COVID hit in March. So we never started offline. Even we wondered how people are going buy custom made pants online. Over time, we learned we can educate them on their fit, sizing, made a lot of videos, size guides. And we were bad at it initially. 75% orders used to fit well, 25% used to need an alteration and it was expensive to get them back and send it back. But then over time, as we got more and more data and we served a few lakh Indian men with custom pants, we learned these other the common problems. You know, the hip to waist ratio, ah the thigh, the crotch area of a pant is super important. The seat, ah the fitting at the ankle opening, how does each fit based on the stretch of the fabric? And with those learnings, we were able to get better and better today when it's like a 93% fit accuracy. And obviously the goal is to get towards like a 98, 99%.
Speaker: uh fit accuracy as the database keeps growing uh but we we started at the worst possible time we started custom made uh business is still on you're still learning that in addition to it's part of the time project and uh yeah p project has two lines of product even custom made and ready to wear uh custom made is a five-year-old business ready to wear is like a 24-month-old business Ready to wear obviously scales much faster because there's no friction on waiting 10 days for a custom pant. There's no friction on sizing and measurement. You just buy 36. If it doesn't fit you, you exchange it for another size.
Speaker: You go to a store, you can walk out with the pants the same moment. So you know that's a much more scalable business. But the custom business is important for data on sizing and fit. And there's also a segment of the audience that's non-standard sizing or that wants that ah personalization. monogramming the initials of their name on the pant or choosing how to style it with a pleat or crease or American turn-up hem. Also some luxury fabrics, fabrics like you know luxury wools that i Italian wools, Merino wool, or your linens, you know European flaxseed linen. Those are sort of fabrics where if you're paying five grand, seven grand for a pair of pants, you want to get a custom tailored because you really care for it to fit absolutely right. What's your era today and how does it split between these two business lines?
Speaker: Yeah, so FY26, we'd probably close at like 80 crores in net sales. Monthly at the moment, we're doing like 10 crores a month in net sales. um It's an 80% digital business.
Speaker: It's 20% offline. We've got 15 company-owned, company-operated. stores and the offline is heavily owned website first. So we're 60% on pan project.com 20% on mid run Amazon and 20% on stores. And that's a conscious design choice. I think Odith and I were clear that a brand is built on your own channels. A brand is built when you have a direct relationship with the consumer, you know, your customer, you can serve them in the way you would like to serve them. And, uh, uh,
Speaker: would want to have a long term relationship with you. Platforms like Vintra and Amazon are great and they've been great partners to us but They don't give you first party data and so you can't retarget or you know have a long-term conversation with your consumer. And so they're great to be available on ah once you've built a brand so that you have distribution. It's important to be present where the consumer is present, but they're not really channels on which you can build a brand. And this comes from our time in the US. you know If you look at the DTC movement in the US, and we spent 2009 to in the US. um
Speaker: That's when really had its boom in the US. You had your Harry's, Dollar Shave Club, Bonapos, Everlane of the world sort of built out there. That was all on website first. and Businesses like Worry today in the US are like 400-500 million sales, all on website first, um and then offline stores as they expand. So we think you know that model of owning customer relationship is super important while being present ah where your consumer is.
Speaker: Okay. ah And within the ah custom and ready-to-wear, what is the split of your ARR? That's what's really changed, right? We were doing 30 crores a year just about 18 to 24 months ago.
Speaker: And that was a 90% custom-made business at 30 crore scale. Today at 120 crores run rate, it is 85% ready-to-wear business and 15% custom. So that custom business has basically stayed at that same 25, 30 crore revenue mark. And we've added like 100 crores of ready-to-wear sales on top of that.
Speaker: Okay. And is this your choice or customer choice? What does it show? Does it, ah because it could be your choice also that you don't want to spend money on promoting the custom business. so So I'm just wondering why this is so. think as business owners, you would go where the customer goes. And it's obvious that there's less friction to a ready-to-wear purchase than a custom made. In the consumer journey, it's obvious you can offer a sharper price point in ready-to-wear, ready-to-wear pants. start sub 2000 rupees our custom pants start north of 3000 rupees the cost to make a custom bank is significantly higher than the cost to make a ready to wear pant and so uh you go where the market goes i think the custom business continues to be important both from a positioning and differentiation standpoint a lot of people know about the fan project because custom made pants And are also important from an experience standpoint, particularly in our stores where there are customers who come in and say, i want to tailor a pair of pants.
Speaker: But the ready-to-wear business is the really quick-fire growth business. And it's where 80% of consumers say, hey, I am a standard size. I fit into a slim fit or a tapered fit a relaxed fit. i know my size i just want good ready pants and delivered tomorrow and with quick commerce the world is moving to like now uh they want things like on demand as of yesterday and even categories like pants which you really don't need in 30 minutes to an hour uh want uh as quickly as they can yet so with with that trend ah where the world is moving you know we see ready to wear continuing to scale and i think on the back end custom is incredibly complex so if we were 120 crore custom-made business today ah we would be making thousands of individual pants individual patterns each tailor stitching each band and i think that would be pretty nightmarish to manage on the back end ready to as a little easier you produce the pants hold the inventory and ship it out as soon as the order comes in uh so think it's a function of both things Okay. ah
Speaker: What is your supply side mode? Supply side, so many things. I think the biggest one comes from, you know, knowledge on fabric technology, research and development, product engineering. And we really do think of ourselves at the Pan Project as a brand that,
Speaker: ah understands consumer problems and delivers consumer solutions in bottom there. And, you know, a simple example of that is like we launched it just 18 months ago, Black Friday, we sold a lot of black jeans.
Speaker: ah Consumers came back and, you know, jeans typically fade and you have these nice like wash down looks, brands like scotch and so on, known for it. Like people say, oh wow, it faded so nicely. But our consumer came back and said, hey, I want to wear this to a little bit more formal location. i want to wear it office or like I want to wear it to a wedding. It would be really nice if you built They don't tell you this, no consumer tells you exactly what they want people to read into what they're saying. And so we said, what if we launched a no fade jean? And that's why like we kicked in with our fabric tech and innovation, went into the lab, built the most ah you know durable no fade jeans and launched these 30 wash no fade guarantee, ink lock black no fade jeans. And this ink lock technology is something you know we put together with i years of experience in the textile industry. So I think that fabric tech and innovation is is how we like to think of this business. And you know this is just one example, but I think a pattern is a complex back-end first category.
Speaker: And so I'd say it's one where knowing every element of the supply chain from the fiber to the fabric, yarn to the fabric, to the dyeing, to the stitching is super important. and We're not just ah doing topical solutions. so I say we're really engineering like the pizza base itself, as opposed to just saying, or design-wise, you know here are some toppings, let's throw on today this topping and tomorrow that topping. We like to think of ourselves as always tweaking oven temperatures, amount of duration of time in the oven, you know base settings, base ingredients ah for the best fabric in the brand. So yeah I think supply side, that's the biggest one. I think another one is obviously trust in the supply chain. And so while this business started with 100% of sourcing being from Manswara Syntex, which is the family business, over time, we've got institutional investors on board. Over time, we've grown categories beyond what the family business
Speaker: And denims, for example, is now 25% our sales and Banswara doesn't make a single piece of denim, right? So we've grown our supply chain beyond what the family business has. Now we have 12 to 15 vendors across the country. We source from different clusters in the country who are best at certain things, you know, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Surat, a certain type of product. could there The South, Bangalore, Chennai, Khorbatul, Tirupur, the North, Ludhiana, Delhi cluster, you know,
Speaker: I think that trust in the industry of knowing who to work with and how to work with them to develop the most innovative product is also something that's a supply side advantage for us. You don't manufacture the pants in-house. They are ah basically contract manufactured. contract manufactured ah so So the innovation, how does that happen? Is it like a joint innovation?
Speaker: Okay. So you work with the supplier, like like in case of your family business, of course, it's it's a lot easier. You have a lot more control. ah But even with the...
Speaker: Like I gave you the example on the jeans, and the beauty of this is most innovations are not just at one stage in the process. ah So I'll give you another example. We've launched these Malai Super Soft Touch Power Stretch Pants. Now, there's an innovation there at the yarn level. We're using like a hollow fiber to give these more breathability as a product with the Super Power Stretch Pants.
Speaker: You know, also using nylon and a certain twist on the nylon yarns to give it stretch while giving it breathability and recovery as a product um and durability. And then there's also innovation on the dyes and chemicals front, which comes from another you know supplier. And then there's you know work on the stitching side. so I use the pizza analogy because we think of ourselves as the chefs in the kitchen. We know the recipe end to end, and we have multiple partners across parts of the supply chain, and each one of them helps us with certain parts of the puzzle that we're looking to solve.
Speaker: You might be buying yarn and giving it to someone to make the pant out of. Instead of letting him just give you the final pant, you would actually give him the material from which he... In our industry, we call it nominated suppliers. And so, yeah, while we may buy the finished bank from a certain vendor, we nominate the vendors across the supply chain. um Pretty standard.
Speaker: Okay, got it. So, in a way, ah the customers of Banswara would be fairly sophisticated buyers. You probably would also be having export orders, I guess. And you would have learned from them on how these large, sophisticated buyers...
Speaker: do product innovation? Yeah, 100%. I think the funny thing is though, it's when you've been in industry so long, the innovations don't only come from within your set of customers. So like our power stretch pants have this shirt gripper in them and it's got these like silicone knots. That's actually something we borrowed from the lingerie industry.
Speaker: And it came from bra straps that used to have silicone on them so that they don't fall off the shoulder. And so I think it's come from more being in the industry for so long that you're always looking at who's doing what innovatively and then cross-pollinating. And, you know, we believe the best ideas come from multiple sources and it's our job to be that composer, putting them together. And we also just stress test, uh,
Speaker: We just just test the crap out of them in the lab, man. We're like very high threshold for quality and we spend months, if not years, ah testing something before we release it. So we're slow fashion in that sense that something could take us two years on R&D before we bring it to market. But when we bring it to market, we're ah pretty sure it's the best thing out there in the market. Interesting. um You, I believe you told me just now you were at about 30 crores about two years back. And I guess that's when you would have raised your first round.
Speaker: Were you profitable at that stage? Or what did the business look like when you were at 30 crores? Just help me understand. Yeah, I think we were a custom-made business then. Custom, as I said, is expensive to manufacture pants. So apparel is a good gross margin, typically a good gross margin category. Custom-made was not as great a gross margin as ready-to-wear, even though you sold them at higher price points. And so I'd say gross margin has significantly improved from the time we raised our first round of capital today.
Speaker: It's sort of improved 3% every year. May have been at like 54%, 55%. Today it's at like 60 plus percent, trending towards 65 percent. And when you look at public comps, that's pretty much where gross margin is at in this category. um In terms of marketing efficiency, that's also gotten drastically better over time. and so ah brand takes a lot of dollars in the initial days to build a awareness and cost of customer acquisition is fairly high and so at the time of raising capital we might have been spending ah a dollar ah two and a half dollars like a dollar to get two and a half rupees of sale. Today, if we spend a dollar, we may get four rupees of sale. And so that efficiency continues to come as the business scales. And so when we raise capital, we'd only put in, you know, about a million dollars of cash ourselves in the business
Speaker: I don't say only lightly, but I mean, it's fairly capital efficient to get to where we had. And we'd manage that because the business wasn't burning a ton of money, ah but it wasn't EBITDA profitable at that point in time. It had a path to profitability. And even today, when we think about this, we're not optimizing for profits today. or What we're optimizing for is when this business is at scale, is it profitable? And also when you're acquiring customers really quickly and you're growing quickly, you're spending most of the profits you make. reinvesting them into getting new customers and growing in like 2x a year. So our retention funnels are super strong. And, you know, the day we slow down based on new customer acquisition or continue to hit scale, this business will be extremely profitable. Yeah, the goal is when you build a large business, you have to build it with sensible economics and consumers, a category where the public markets will only value EBITDA and business.
Speaker: app And so we are definitely building this for of when, you know, if we do get there, are at like a thousand crore revenue scale. This business is one where the economics check out and you're making sensible profits. Okay.
Speaker: When you were raising your round, uh, But, I mean, was there an investor concern about the link with the family business, the sourcing probably coming from the family business and things like that?
Speaker: Yeah, it's a reasonable question to ask. Investor was obviously asked that, you know, There's a concept around arm's length pricing and just the idea that you're buying from your family business at the same price at which they're selling to other consumers the same product. That was validated. We had due diligence firm come in, you know, one of the big four, and they did the audit to ensure that we are buying at the same rates. So that was clean. And I think the other concern was just, are you too dependent on any one supplier? And that's not even the fact that it's your family business. It's like any business should not be too dependent on any one supplier. And so can you build a diversified supply chain?
Speaker: Okay, which you did eventually. Which we've done now. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Interesting. I think the bigger risks that they were underwriting is can this business scale quickly and pivot from custom made or ready to air? We had two stores at that point in time, and the stores were like two months old. So we were an online only business. And as I said, apparel is largely an offline market. So to get to scale, we need to be an omni-channel brand. So they were betting on can we succeed on the store rollouts and we've gone from two stores to 15 stores now and have a roadmap to open 100 stores in the next three years. And then the other thing they were betting on is we were a pants only business at that point in time.
Speaker: ah Could we crack jeans and would jeans be accepted under the PAN project brand name? Because people often think of jeans as like a separate product. Today, we've seen that our consumer does consider jeans to be bottom-wear. Now, the next leap of faith would be, you know if at all at some point in time, could the bank project sell more than pants?
Speaker: Okay. The funds you largely needed for offline, that was the reason to raise funds. Yeah. A couple of reasons to raise funds. not Yes, offline expansion obviously uses cash, and that was one of the big use of funds. ah The second was, you know we wanted to really optimize for building a brand. Till that point in time, we'd spend most of our money on performance marketing, which was very product-led.
Speaker: ah But with Investor Cash in hand, we were able to spend a little bit more on building IPs like Inklock and Malai or building brand around comfort as an emotion. And the third important one and often overlooked one is, you know while we came from an established family business setup, having institutional capital gave us a huge unlock in terms of attracting top talent.
Speaker: and that's not talked about enough. sort of ah We've got some really top talent in after the round across the organization. Like ah VP of retail ah comes from Lenskart. He ran 300 plus stores for them, 800 crores in revenue for them, 18 years in retail, spent time at Decathlon. VP of marketing has 18 years in marketing. CMO, she's you know spent a ton of time on digital marketing.
Speaker: Head of finance has spent 20 years in it. industry so you know we were young kids we were 30 32 years old we were like we want to build a team of experienced professionals that can run this business at scale while having that young entrepreneur bud and i think that institutional validation definitely helped bring in this top talent also you know from a realistic perspective while you're a family business and you may be growing uh people would say how would my esops be valued uh here it's not driven with a value here is there's an external investor saying i believe they're worth this much and
Speaker: If you grow, they will be worth as much more, so it's easier to draft. Was it a ah tough round to raise for you? Or because you already had 30 crores of revenue, so the proof was there and...
Speaker: I think ah a raising capital ah is should never be the primary objective. It's something that should come as a function of running a good business. I think what was hard was making the decision to raise capital. ah That itself took us time to come around to do we want to do that or not. ah But once we made that decision, raising capital is also never easy. So anyone who tells you like you just woke up tomorrow and raised capital, doesn't happen that way. There's like a proper process that you run.
Speaker: become and i think the first round is always the most interesting way you know you're preparing the company to be one that's institutionally backed now as opposed to being uh just family run but uh you know fortunately things ended up working well and we got the right partners and solid investments i think meeting of like minds with their you know private equity experience at kk understanding cash flow than that and also the journey at nika that they've seen on large consumer brand being built so What would you advise to a founder who's raising their first round ever, who has no experience of raising from institutional investors?
Speaker: Yeah, a few things. Honestly, advice also really matters on the type of business you I think I'd advise a tech founder differently from how I would advise a consumer brand founder. ah But since I know consumer brand better, I would say, ah you know, A, raise as late as you can after you have PMF. If you have the luxury of bootstrapping, even with really small amounts of capital, you will save yourself a lot of dilution.
Speaker: The second raise little capital as you can. It's very tempting and easy to go out there and raise and make that headline what you are chasing it's ask yourself realistically how much capital does the business need for 18 to 24 months of growth what you need to get to the next milestone and raising capital is it a thing to celebrate in itself what it is is just more oxygen for the business to hit its next milestone and then the others optimize for the right partners it's something that you have to live with for the next five, seven, ten years. have to work with these people every day. You have to really trust them, like them as people. And so we've seen enough businesses just end up in really toxic places if you don't have the right partners. So optimize for that.
Speaker: Your founder peace of mind will be driven by having the right partners. Okay, so now let's come to marketing efficiency. You mentioned how marketing efficiency has increased from ah two and a half times revenue per dollar spent to two today it's about four times revenue per dollar spent. You know, what was it that you were doing at that time? What did you learn? How did you increase the efficiency?
Speaker: You know, what's some advice that you can share with founders around that? Take me through the journey first. like Like, how did you start when on day one, what was it that you were spending money on and how has it changed?
Speaker: So I think from day one, we were clear we want to build an in-house marketing team. And if I to give advice to founders, I'd say if you're outsourcing all of your content creation to agencies, then you're not even building a brand. An agency can help you with content ideas and parts of your content creation. But two fundamental things of building a brand is engineering product and figuring out marketing. That is...
Speaker: the core of what a brand is. ah Now, we started with an in-house marketing team. You know, Udit, fortunately, has been to art school. He's a creative. He has a great design sense. He understands branding and marketing. And, you know, he's also studied fashion. So, you know, we always knew we wanted to build a strong in-house muscle. Today, we have, we started with two or three content creators. Today, we're a team of 15 to 20 in-house marketers. We write our own scripts. We shoot our own ads, videos, static, email, Google, meta. ah
Speaker: you know Long form, short form, blog, everything sort of done in-house. um And we think that's a strong muscle. you know Where this has evolved is we used to get $1 of sales for every dollar of marketing. And now it's at $4. As the brand compounds, that will only get more and more efficient. ah But what's also changed is our understanding of what works. And you know in the last 18 months, We've really doubled down on content variety. and Meta has changed so much where you just can't spend all your dollars on the same one message delivered in the same way. ah
Speaker: You need to have super large creative diversity. You need to work with ah both in-house content as well as influencer and you know paid partnerships with influencers an extremely powerful growth lever.
Speaker: And you need to understand your marketing funnel and conversion journey. And so we've gone from, you know, 18 months ago, like 3 lakh visitors on our website a month to like 10 lakh visitors, like a million monthly visitors. And we managed to drive that with improved efficiency because we're always looking at what does someone, how does someone find out about us?
Speaker: Why do they like us? Why do they not like us? you know When they come to our website, what do they do? Where do they click more? Where do they drop off? When they see an ad, which ads work, which don't? What marketing message resonates? And that's an iterative process. I think you'll always get better. I think over time, also get more and more clarity around the pillars that are not changing. And so we've realized comfort is one of those massive pillars for us. and I can say with fair degree of confidence, five years from now, men are not going to say, I want uncomfortable in pants. They're not going to wear the high heels of pants just because they look good. They're going to continue to say, I want comfort. And and I prefer to the think of business on what's not going to change in the next five years, because what's going to change? I don't know what's changing like so quickly and you'll adapt once it changes. But what are a few constants like faster delivery? Who's going to say I want it slower?
Speaker: ah like better prices for better quality who's going to say I want shit quality at like really expensive prices and like comfort who's going to say i don't want it comfortable so if you know like these like constants then you can put a lot of energy into saying okay let me optimize for fit let me optimize for speed delivery let me optimize for you know messaging around comfort because I'm very confident if I spend dollars behind this it will come compound So your ah marketing efficiency of 2.5 going up to 4x is because of content diversity?
Speaker: So I'd say there's three or four things. It's not just one thing. One is we've gotten better at content. The second is we've grown our offline retail stores. And as you grow offline footprint, your online marketing also gets more efficient. That's omni-channel. Offline also builds trust. And within the cities in which you have stores, you see digital revenue continue to grow also. we've also grown our product catalog so you open up new markets like we didn't have jeans as a product 18 months ago we now have jeans there are a set of guys who only wear jeans to work everything with me so i think it's a combination of things content plus distribution plus product okay okay okay interesting um
Speaker: You had two stores when you raised funds. So at that time, those two stores were for the custom but business. At that time, you didn't have ready. Primarily custom. And one of them was a tiny 250 square feet store in a back alley in Maltra that we put together with Bootstrap Money, found really rural rental, you know couldn't afford to pay Linking Road, Main Street, Bombay Rentals. And so said, proof of concept, take a back alley. Can we get a thousand customers in there? Let's see how they interact with the brand. Oh, okay. They're actually liking the product. They're liking the retail experience. there is merit to this. Then we went and signed something bigger around the main street. And yeah the other one was in Jaya Raga in Manlo. We did that with our partners, Light Store.
Speaker: And that was a business that helps digital brands go offline. They shared part of the cost of putting up this store. It was all experimentation. it was we We didn't even know if retail will work for us as a model. right And I think when we started to see the early signs of, oh, this is working, then we got excited and we were like, okay, let's raise institutional capital. This has legs to it. Like we want to open hundreds of stores and you can't do that on your own dollar fast enough unless you pour a ton of money into this. So, you know, that plus the fact that they were building learnings into team and offline expansion and brand building would be a good reason to raise money.
Speaker: So what have you learned about retail? Like, you know, they say like location, location, location, the three most important things. And, you know, maybe you've learned a couple of such rules on what works in retail and how to... This could be a thesis in itself and a podcast in itself. Honestly, I owe what I've learned to retail to Sharath, who is our VP of retail. and He's brought a lot learnings in from his experience. But... I would say also from experimentation, you're right, location is absolutely the key to retail. But what we've learned is it's really important to know your store format and know your store economics and crack that format. And so when we started with three formats, we were playing around with like really small format stores like that. 250 square foot in Bandra, mid-size stores like 700, 800 square feet. And then we even tried a large format store like 1,300, 1,500 square feet, you know larger than life, like experience center. I think what we've come to the realization over time is the sweet spot for us as a brand today sits in that 700, 800 square feet. You want to open like 80% of stores there. In certain markets where rent is crazy or like you're in a prime mall, you can't get more space, you open a small store. And in certain cities where one city, one store in a city or a few stores in a city, you open a larger flagship store. So it's important to know what each store is trying to serve. 700 times per feet for us has been the right size to show the entire breadth product or have enough space to trial rooms. I think another learning there is, you know, men's ah one trial room in a store, man's not going to wait for the other man to finish trying. He's probably just going to leave your store. Men are highly impatient. And so like, yeah, that whole experience needs to be extremely smooth. ah so yeah that that's where don for If I had to break down the retail journey, you know for me, the retail math works like footfalls, X conversion rate, X average order value, and your job is
Speaker: through either really good leasing, so you have a naturally prime location, the footfalls get driven by that, or through a combination of leasing plus digital marketing discovery, you can drive footfalls to your store. Your conversion is determined by the look and feel of your store, and your product mix in your store, and in the hiring and training of your sales staff.
Speaker: And that's a super, super important part of this business. And your average order value is obviously driven by people like what you're selling and you know how you can understand consumer needs so you can serve larger and larger parts of their wardrobe uh so i think you know that's how we break down retail economics wise the benefit of having you know slightly smaller store size than these like super large format stores is the capex per store is fairly contained you can you can open a store in less than fifty thousand dollars all-inclusive CapEx, rent, initial rental, and security deposit plus inventory. And that makes this a much more you know scalable model with relatively less cash. And it also makes this a model which can open hundreds of stores in India. I mean, we're excited by the fact that there are so many brands in India that have 100 plus stores and you know they're even brands with like 1000 plus stores you know let's kind of getting close to the 3000 store market in India so it's a very very deep market okay all your stores are cell phone like company owned company operated
Speaker: Yeah, as of date. And I think for the initial days, you know like we said, we built e-com-owned website first. We're sort of the folks who like to have control over customer experience initially. And so we're doing company-on-company operated first. And then, yes, there's merit to being in a shopper's store. Yes, there's merit to being in Central, Lulu, Lifestyle. We will do that over time. Yes, there's merit to considering franchising, it's more capital efficient, but can you do that without ruining customer experience? Can find the right community franchise partners? Are you that sure on your store economics today that franchises would take the bet? So I think first 50 stores out the gate, maybe first 100 are likely to be company-operated.
Speaker: Okay. okay oh So ah how does ah digital help you drive footfall? mean, if you're spending money on ads, wouldn't you rather drive the direct sale by sending them to your website to buy a pant? like how How do you drive traffic? you You are sending them to your website to buy a pant, but on your website, there's a tab that says... like visit us at these stores and okay they just naturally end up discovering it ah or they see your ads online and then they drive by that neighborhood where the store is but then they made two references it's not like oh this is a new brand i'm seeing it for the first time in the mall it's like oh yeah i remember i saw those guys on instagram and my friend told me about them and oh they're this mall you know we've realized in that digital journey you need multiple touch points for a consumer and so this becomes one more touch point in that conversion journey Or they saw you on a podcast. that's
Speaker: Okay. Got it. Okay. Interesting. You know, this ah modern trade, I don't know if that's the right term or not, like like in say, beauty, personal care, you call it modern trade, like selling through a shopper stock. but Would you call that modern trade or what would you call that? Yeah, there's different ways to call modern trade, know, LFS, MBO, shop leo a shopping shop, similar things. Sorry, LFS, just break down these terms for me.
Speaker: LFS, large format store. Okay. You're selling within a large format store. MBO, multi-brand outlet. They're an outlet that has multiple brands. SIS, shop and shop. You have a shop within a shop.
Speaker: Okay. And there's, yeah, you know, many of them, you know, Broadway, for example, is one of the new ones that's come up. But yeah, what is what is the question around LFS MBO? Yeah, I want to understand... ah like Is that purely a pushing inventory play where you are like, if I'm selling a shampoo through ah like a modern trade, I'm essentially just ensuring my shampoo is reaching and is visible on the shelves. Is it similar when you're selling clothes or how is it different?
Speaker: don't know if it's just pushing product. I would say it is a visibility channel too. And so if you were in a shopper's shop with a like set of a pair of brands, I do think some set of new audience would also discover you.
Speaker: But I do think to do well in those formats, ah you would have to have some established brand equity because as I said, trust is not just one interaction. And so people would have to know you or see you enough times to buy you frequently.
Speaker: So ah like like you said, you're not yet ready for that. Why is it? I don't know if we're not ready for it. ah We might be very close to ready for it, to be honest. ah We are in Broadway now and we will experiment with the format. ah We just have always done things very deep in one channel before going too wide. And as founders, a philosophy we had is, you know, that's why it's only pants. That's why it's like digital first for many years before offline. i'll get them all right before you really scale. Marketplace, a small part of our business can be a large part in the future. you know First, Coco stores, then SIS. and We think business is complex enough that if you take one ah really hard problem to solve every year and you crack that, then you can you know get the next one. If you're trying to solve five hard problems at the same time, you're probably not doing justice to any of them and you may take longer to solve all five of them than just go
Speaker: you know one by one so focus is something we think of as our superpower there'd be enough folks who argue that you're moving too slowly or you're missing out on opportunity uh we are fairly low on fomo and optimizing for being in business for 50 plus years so we're okay to take our time and it's not like the business is growing slowly i think a business doubling every year is growing at a fair pace. So, you know, if we felt we were not able to grow because we were limiting ourselves by doing too little, that would be another conversation.
Speaker: Okay. How did you learn this? I mean, a lot of this stuff is... Not stuff which someone knows at like a 30, 25, 30 age. Is this like dinner table conversations, hearing your family talk about danda?
Speaker: Yeah, maybe it's organic DNA. You know, it's how the family business only made thread for 15 years. Then, you know they started making fabrics and they only made fabrics and thread for 30 years. Then they started stitching garments and now for 50 years they've been doing all three together. But... um you know It used to be just an in India business and then in the 90s when India opened up, started doing exports. and so I think we've seen that durability is built by having intense focus. and ah you know They say when you have a microscope, the only way to really
Speaker: do something well is to obsess over every detail in what you're doing. You know each one of those, you asked about retail and we talked about it very casually for like 10 minutes, but each one of the topics we're talking about today is a podcast in itself, is multiple lifetimes of learning in itself. And so we find it very interesting to go very deep in few things. And I feel like, um you know, you could really become an expert in each one of these things.
Speaker: Amazing. Fascinating. Sorry, just to add to that also, i you know you keep asking how what's changed early to now. And I'd say even personally for me, you know when you're in your 20s, you're always looking for novelty. and A lot of young people listen to this, right?
Speaker: When you're in your 20s, a great time to figure out what do you want to do? What are you good at? And so we spend a lot of time just trying different things. And that's great. That's the time to try many different things. Your brain is also hard when you are young that you don't understand risk. So you're just like, oh, this seems like a good idea. Let's like try it. And that's great. You just try a lot of random things. something well You don't see the downside. yeah No, I think that's great. As you get older, you realize, you know, so I'm naturally good. This is where my interest lies.
Speaker: This is where i can see some compounding benefit of come in. And I no longer need novelty from doing 100 different things every day. I no longer need in one year to try five new things to be super excited about. it i'm actually find it intellectually stimulating to solve very specific problems in more depth and sit with them over a 10 year period and say, can I really become a master in that? In a Japanese way there, where like a sous chef learns to roll sushi for like 10 years and gets so familiar with every very intricate detail of the process is the way we like to think about building a business or, you know, passion for what you do. It's like, um you know, can I be the absolute best at one thing first before I try to do everything under the sun?
Speaker: Amazing. I want to kind of end by understanding ah how you figured out how to hire people. so you said your CMO, your head of sales are all like people with 18, 20 years of experience.
Speaker: um How do you begin to judge somebody for that role? Because you have no idea what ah good looks like, right? So like, how do you crack that? bit Like, you know, in terms of hiring the best talent?
Speaker: The hiring is one of the hardest parts of running a business and it's not even the experience, only the experienced folks. We a lot of young talent. The average age in the company is about 30 years old. you know So a lot of young folks too. I would say, you know one you just talk to a lot of different people.
Speaker: And so I'm always hiring. I'm always, every single day, meeting people. meeting people and that gets you a good sense of where the market is at and what sort of talent is out there. You spend a lot of time internally to try to figure out um you know mental model-wise skill sets that exist within your org and then skill sets that you need to acquire and that you feel will be important for your org in the future. and start to look around and say you know a lot of our hiring at PAM project is not from our industry so funny enough maybe 50% of the folks at PAM project are from an apparel background but 50% are non-apparel you know they come from some of them even non-consumer businesses and we're never scared to hire from outside the industry because we say we know apparel fairly well we've been doing it for 50 years we can
Speaker: teach you apparel if you're relatively smart and willing to learn. ah But you will bring in a lot of best practices from industries that we have no idea about. And so we you know may learn a couple of things from you. um And you'll leave an expert in pants, and we'll leave richer for the experience from what you bring in. So we look at that as as diversity being important. And I think then generally you look for a high sense of ownership. So few things I look for across candidates is just like in in anything they've done, have they demonstrated ownership, on track record, obviously past is a decent predictor of future there. and you know look for outsized ownership. Most of our leaders have led PNLs, very hands-on, very self-motivated. We love hiring ex-entrepreneurs. Most of our leaders also love being ex-entrepreneurs, even if it's at a small scale or some sort of entrepreneurial idea. And then,
Speaker: I think the the software side is super important. So you're not just putting together a team of superstars, you're putting together a team that can work together. And so you try to filter for values and you know just generally you know hire people that can work collaboratively. So I think hiring is mixed art and science and you have to do a lot of reps. And I'd say even the best people at hiring are never 100% right. We made our fair share of mistakes.
Speaker: continue to make them and will make them. You just keep learning as you go. I think if you can correct them and unwind them quickly, you're doing decently. And so you hire slow and then hope you can you know make fewer mistakes. i think retention is also... People talk about hiring, but You shouldn't need to hire unless the org is growing and you need to acquire new skills. Retention solves for that. And so we have been fairly obsessed with also building a culture where people are just happy to work with the bank project. And you know fortunately, then I think we challenged a few of the myths there. People say customer services in industry, which has notoriously, like call centers are notorious for high churn. Like if you work one half, two years there, people say you've
Speaker: lived a long call center life. Our customer service team, you know, four or five of the agents who've been with us since the start of the brand are still with us. And, ah you know, retail, they say, is churn and burn. You know, we're opening stores and we want people to build long careers with us. So I think if you build good environments to work Good is not just like throw freebies at people, give them kombucha and whatnot. It's good is give them meaningful sense of ownership. Let them feel like they're a part of a larger mission. Let them take on hard problems and have the autonomy to solve them. Let them make mistakes and move from them and give them more responsibility. like good is part tough love part uh you know challenging growth environment where you're taking on interesting problems to solve not just i go to work nine to five it's super easy i you know love what i work because they just throw a ton free stuff at me i think in india uh people are so entrepreneurial if you give them space to express their talents and if you make them feel a part your business and you know
Speaker: They go the extra mile for you. We've seen that with our team. And so but we filter that compounds over time. I think our best hires now are referrals. Like we're a 120% team now.
Speaker: And that network of 120 plus the alumni we've had. That's another important thing, right? The people who leave you. and I'm most happy when someone leaves me to go on and start their own business, or join another you know entrepreneurial venture. of that alumni network continues to grow so i feel like uh hiring is just part of it retention is super important and go on a talent but you know training development is another module in itself that's super super critical especially with stores i'm learning how important not just having the right people but having them have that product knowledge you know we're claiming to be the brand pros the experts at pants if you walk into a store and you meet an unknowledgeable salesperson you're going to wonder hey this brand is saying they're the prime pros but the salesperson knows nothing about you know bottom there. It's our job then to train them and make them the experts in the product. and so I think each aspect of that you know human relationship is something I'm genuinely super curious about and we obsess over. I'd say that the talent layer of the org is is the heartbeat of the org.
Speaker: Amazing. Thank you so much for time, Dhruv. really enjoyed our conversation. Thanks. Can we plug something in on technology? I feel like I haven't talked about tech. Okay. Okay. Everyone's going to order you about tech. In fact, I did have a question there which slipped my mind.
Speaker: Why do you still need a customer service team? who Wouldn't AI voice agents handle that? like like I mean, respect I at least hear claims that AI voice agents can replace a customer service team.
Speaker: Yeah, so it's funny you say that. We do have an AI chatbot and it does handle a certain volume of queries. We even have AI automated calling for things like non-delivered parcels where they contact you and say know why we're not available. But we fundamentally believe in a high-touch business like men's pants. At some point, ah people do want to talk to humans. and Especially when they're really, really angry. The most annoying thing is when you're constantly in a death loop with a bot. So something we built is easy exit pathways where you say, hey, I want talk to human agent and a real human like comes and rescues you. right And it's the same with upsell and cross-sell. And I think like tech is great on solving for transactional, where is my order, ah you know basic queries, but I think it's not yet at the point where it can empathize with a human.
Speaker: Okay. What are the other ways in which you are using tech? Yeah. ah Tech is something that powers a brand right from the back end to the front end. And so when we look at tech and our business on the back end tech, ah we're doing some interesting stuff around, you know, predictive analytics on the inventory management. We're doing some interesting things on ah you know visibility of production and plans through the supply chain.
Speaker: ah When we look at the front end of this business, ah you know we've got analytics around how people are interacting at different areas in our store and giving us insights into how we should lay out a store basis where customers are spending more and less time. ah We're also you know experimenting with AI on things like virtual try-ons or virtual AI sizing in our business. I think those techs are not yet super mature, but things that we are interested in for the future. and I think overall as a business, we're always asking ourselves how AI can make us more efficient while continuing to believe that ai is in the be all and solve all world for everything. So in marketing, we use AI for some content creation, but we also have like a large in-house content production team. And so striking that balance between you know being tech forward while ah consumers still don't want to see like AI models every single day. They want to see real humans or they want to see stuff that you know feels like relatable, memeable,
Speaker: friend-like content. So I think you know tech has played a large part across the platform in the business, but we are still a consumer product company, like a product-led business. ah We're still a brand. And so what the brand stands for really matters. And tech is the enabler. ah It's the layer that makes everything more efficient across supply chain and consumer experience.
Speaker: yeah So let me end with this. You've seen brands across the spectrum, India, us which is a consumer brand that continues to inspire you, the the brand that you most want to emulate? There's so many brands that we love. ah I mean, I could say at a global scale, Uniqlo's fabric tech is super awesome. I could say i love suit supply. The suit supply consumer experience in the US is phenomenal.
Speaker: ah I think Lululemon has built a kick-ass ABC pant, and that pant itself is one of the best in the market, but it's $120 to $150, which is pretty expensive for the Indian consumer. um And, you know,
Speaker: I think in denims, there's so many good or Japanese denim brands that are unheard of, like Chota, Tokyo.
Speaker: Maybe I scrapped that. It's too niche for the audience. But I think I can keep this at just Uniqlo, Suitsupply. I don't know who else, man. There's so many. There's actually so many brands.
Speaker: So you you're more of the product guy. you you and i like You would admire a brand for the quality of product. Yes. Not for, let's how good their Instagram ads are. I think that's secondary function. I think the product is what really sells and that's what the consumer is consuming. And so a brand has to deliver excellence in product.
Speaker: If you stick away the marketing layer and the product is crap, then the brand is a hollow promise. We think of brand as a promise delivered consistently over time. And so if it's just a promise, then it's an empty promise. The best brands have sticky consumers because they have kick-ass product.
Speaker: And so while Apple has built this like amazing brand, Halo, it's also just built really nice laptops and phones. so It's not just an empty promise. um Amazing. Thank you so much for your time, Dhruv. enjoyed our conversation. Thanks.
