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How Two Mothers Built a D2C Food Brand | Shauravi Malik (Slurrp Farm)
146 Plays4 years ago
"The interesting thing was that you have the dream and the vision, but you realize the answer is your grandmother's kitchen."
This insight from Shauravi Malik highlights a core theme: sometimes the most innovative solutions involve looking back at traditional wisdom. While aiming to disrupt the children's food market with modern, healthy options, Shauravi and her co-founder realized the true market gap wasn't for Western-style purees, but for bringing back nutritious, traditional Indian ingredients like millets.
Shauravi Malik is the Co-Founder of Wholsum Foods, the parent company of the popular children's food brand Slurrp Farm. An Economics graduate from St. Stephen's College and Cambridge University, she spent years in high-profile finance roles at J.P. Morgan and Richard Branson's Virgin Group before launching her venture. Driven by the mission to improve children's nutrition in India using supergrains like millets, Slurrp Farm navigated early manufacturing challenges and a challenging offline distribution landscape before a strategic pivot to digital during COVID-19 saw the company grow significantly, reaching a monthly run rate of approx. ₹1.2 crores.
Key Insights from the Conversation:
- Market Need Discovery: Initial assumptions about market needs (like fruit/veg purees) can be wrong, even with research. Finding the real pain point (lack of healthy, millet-based options) was key.
- Manufacturing Hurdles: Finding partners willing to innovate and produce genuinely healthy products at scale, rather than variations of existing unhealthy options, was a major early challenge.
- Ecosystem Impact: Policy changes like GST and Demonetization significantly levelled the playing field for startups by simplifying interstate commerce and financial D2C
Chapters:
- 0:00:48 - Intro: Shauravi Malik & The Slurrp Farm Story
- 0:01:18 - Early Career: From Cambridge to Investment Banking & Virgin
- 0:10:16 - The Genesis of Slurrp Farm: Identifying the Gap in Children's Food
- 0:18:40 - Starting Up: Vision vs. Reality & Initial Product Ideas
- 0:24:25 - Finding the Right Product: The Ragi Cookie Journey & Manufacturing Challenges
- 0:32:09 - Launching Slurrp Farm: Navigating Pre-GST India & Early Go-To-Market
- 0:37:07 - The Painful Journey of Building Offline Distribution
- 0:43:19 - Funding Journey: Friends, Family & Finding the Right Partners
- 0:45:27 - The COVID Pivot: Embracing Digital & Achieving Profitability
- 0:59:41 - Product Evolution: From Cereals to Dosas, Pancakes & Beyond
- 1:09:53 - The Role of Co-Founder Umang & Design-First Branding
- 1:19:59 - Understanding the D2C Landscape in India
Hashtags:
#FounderThesis #SlurrpFarm #ShauraviMalik #StartupIndia #D2C #DirectToConsumer #IndianStartups #Entrepreneurship #WomensEntrepreneurship #FoodTech #HealthyEating #Millets #ChildrensFood #FMCG #BrandBuilding #StartupJourney #VentureCapital #BusinessPodcast #MadeInIndia #ScalingUp #DigitalTransformation #ConsumerBrands
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Take me
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
on a tour, I'll take you on a tour. Chalo. This could be a great intro. Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Saurabh. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hi Akshay, I'm Shauravi. I am the co-founder of Slurpharm along with my dear friend Meekna. As India becomes more developed, its people also demand better products and services. And this creates the opportunity for startups to create products that cater to the needs of the new Indian consumer who is able to spend more for a healthier lifestyle.
00:00:52
Speaker
Shorvi Malik is someone who saw both India and the West and then built a company to bridge the gap between them. She started Slurb Farm, both out of a personal passion for creating healthier eating options for consumers and from a deeper understanding of the FMCG space and seeing the opportunity to build a new age brand. Listen to this fascinating masterclass on setting up a direct-to-consumer startup in India with Shorvi Malik and Akshay Dutt.
00:01:28
Speaker
So in
Shauravi Malik's Career Journey
00:01:29
Speaker
Cambridge, you know, what was like the plan, like once you landed there? Did you want to work in the UK only or did you think that I'll go back to India and find a job or you know, like what happened then? You know, I didn't have any such preconceived notions at all. If I'm really like, I look back at
00:01:53
Speaker
how time was at that time. I think we lived in the early sort of 2002 to 2004, right? Banking was at its peak. So it was not so much a conscious decision as the most sort of visible employer on campus were the 13 investment banks at the time. And I would say,
00:02:21
Speaker
I don't know. I wish that thinking about your career and life choices was a more deliberative thing that one did when they were 18, 19. I think a large degree of what happened around sort of my early twenties was whatever was happening around, you sort of engage with that, right? And there was so much of it on campus and there was so much campus recruitment, next job. And I would say it started with my internship.
00:02:50
Speaker
I did a summer internship and I enjoyed it so much. In an investment bank? At JP Morgan. And then I said, okay, I want to come back and work here. And that's actually all there was to it. There was no like, where am I going to live? What is it going to mean? I don't know. I think it was more the, I loved my job. I loved what I did. And that's all it followed from there.
00:03:16
Speaker
I switched sides and made a conscious decision to work on the mergers and acquisitions team.
Early Entrepreneurial Ventures
00:03:22
Speaker
So it was consumer, health care, retail, M&A. It was such a, so much fun that I don't know if you realize it when you're that young, right? My first ever meeting was the CEO of Carlsberg. I almost overslept and missed the flight because I had worked before him. And then the second time, like,
00:03:44
Speaker
I don't know all kinds of like exciting things that I feel investment banking gives you like a ringside view to at a very young age and it has actually been the formative sort of thought process for now but I didn't know it back then right from like I still remember my boss
00:04:09
Speaker
I was going out for dinner and he called me and he's like, you've got to finish this whatever DCF model by tomorrow morning.
00:04:16
Speaker
It was like first month into the job and I was like, I don't know how to build a DCF model. He's like, you'll know by tomorrow morning. Like, okay, shit. So I went back to office, found someone, you know, very kindly sat up with me all night and taught me what to do. And then next morning I was like, here's my model. I have no idea what I did, but here's what it says. And so there was a lot of that. There was a lot of throwing people into the deep end.
00:04:42
Speaker
And I think it made you sort of grow up and take charge of situations pretty soon. I think it also taught you again, like confidence with numbers. I'm never scared when I see any kind of Excel modeling or, you know, even in the business, I would say both Magna and I, till very recently were always the people doing all of the number crunching. And I think it taught you that from like,
00:05:10
Speaker
You fundamentally understand your business. So you met Meghna also and JP Morgan? No, I met Meghna because interestingly, the same best friend's brother connected both of us.
00:05:26
Speaker
Um, and he basically said, listen, there is this girl, she's great fun. She's having a Diwali party. You're both in London. Why don't you go? He was in Bombay. So, and I was like, seriously, like, I don't know her. I can't just land up at her house. He said, yes, you can land up at her house. Um, so I was like, okay, I'll go. And, um, I went to make my house and he was right. We got along really well.
00:05:56
Speaker
We threw every Diwali party for the next three years together, both of us. And we got along like a house on fire.
Inception of Slurb Farm
00:06:05
Speaker
And a lot of different ideas were in our head at that time. We talked a little bit about this job. And I moved from J.P. Morgan to Virginia. Meghna used to work at McKinsey in London. And Meghna, I would say, has always worked in the health care sector.
00:06:22
Speaker
So in the UK, her clients were really NHS and sort of all healthcare related clients. And then she came back to India and also to healthcare clients, but set up the public health practice. Now, around the time that she was in London, we talked, let's do this. We had some very scandalous business ideas also.
00:06:42
Speaker
I cannot say on your podcast. No, no, you can't. Don't worry. There is no censorship here. Actually, our first business idea was that we wanted to start a sex toys business. You definitely probably want to edit that. But no, no, don't worry. And, you know, it took like 12 hours to be like that's fully illegal and we're not going to do that.
00:07:07
Speaker
Illegal in the UK, not in the UK, right? No, not in India. It was fully illegal. You wanted to do a business in India. Yeah, it was just a joke. It didn't last for longer than like one minute, right? But there still is no one because you walk down the high street in London and you're like, there are three shops doing this, basically. And there are zero shops doing this in India. So it was like, hey, what's up? And
00:07:34
Speaker
We saw many, it was started because there was this friend who was doing really nicely a lingerie business as well with it. That was the first one. Then they were like, you know, the other thing we noticed was an absolute lack of like avocados in India at the time and good Mexican food. And, you know, looking at how sort of Chipotle hits scale, we're like restaurant business, but I feel restaurant businesses are extremely exhausting to get into.
00:08:03
Speaker
This was happening to me because I was also at Virgin and that was like an ideas factory where every day you literally are on the board of or evaluating one mad idea after the other, right? What was your role at Virgin? So I was a corporate finance manager and I reported to the CEO and CFO and it was the part of Virgin which basically managed all of Richard Manson's assets. So essentially it is his portfolio and managing his ownership.
00:08:34
Speaker
in the company. So it was really sort of a nice place to be, right? Because there was everything from he'd set up a business of seven bikers to get to the airport faster. That was called Virgin Limo Bike. Then there was like, Virgin, I don't know, one day he had an idea he wanted to go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest part of the ocean. The next day you were like, how does Virgin Galactic get financing?
00:09:00
Speaker
Then the project we spent a lot of time was on Northern Rock where Virgin bought a British bank after the crisis. Different things, Virgin basically owned a bunch of gyms in South Africa and in the UK called Virgin Active. So, you know, I was on the board of a company called Virgin Gaming, which was a poker site that they had. So I think what it meant was just every day there was like a different
00:09:26
Speaker
business or a business model. And I saw different types of leadership, different teams. So never really far. And I can be honest, I think that what happened for me was that JP Morgan was like, everything had seven zeros, right? origin was a bit more real. They were not billions, but they were still hundreds of thousands and millions. And I was missing a little bit, like, just
00:09:56
Speaker
starting from scratch and seeing things in a simpler realm and being able to affect change. It was also time where in your career you kind of have learned the sort of early skill sets of doing stuff and you're questioning yourself saying what impact am I actually having, right?
00:10:20
Speaker
day by day it's just like more zeros more zeros sometimes I still look at the excel files and be like or zeros you know like you're multiplying rows and columns and it really genuinely I'm paraphrasing now but it got to that and then I just felt I want to get my hands a bit dirty and I
00:10:38
Speaker
That was the genesis of Starting Slope Fund, but I didn't realize quite how dirty or how difficult it was going to. So essentially, like you were again, something similar of what happened to you during your education, that the environment around you was all about startups and business ideas and setting up businesses. Yeah, I think that whole madness and frenzy around entrepreneurship startups had not started, but it was there in the company I was in.
00:11:08
Speaker
you know, I would say this whole like, if you look at the arc of it, really, the crisis has led to all this liquidity being available to startups and therefore, you know, businesses being called entrepreneurship, that whole paradigm, almost cultural shift, right? How
Cultural Shift Towards Entrepreneurship
00:11:29
Speaker
has the crisis led to it?
00:11:31
Speaker
How did the crisis lead to it? Okay, I'll give you a short version, a long version. I'll tell you the concise version of my theory of it, right? Basically the crisis led to... And you're talking about the Lehman crisis just to clarify. Yeah, I'm talking about the banking crisis, right? What I saw, I made a very funny career move, which was that the June of that year,
00:11:57
Speaker
I decided that I was going to move from investment banking M&A to leverage finance. I didn't know that the whole world was going to go pay shift. My team of 100 basically was down by almost 50%. I had just moved to the team, but I survived being in the team as a new person. I was a fairly junior, right?
00:12:21
Speaker
I think it was great because I got to see the crisis from the leverage finance team. So when you understand debt and debt issuance and really you almost, you know, I always do consumer healthcare M&A where you're advising companies what to buy, right? Level finance was that is your core business sustainable enough to
00:12:40
Speaker
take on this debt. So you really get into the fundamentals of different businesses across different sectors. And then what followed soon after was that the team got into restructuring and infrastructure financing. Now, why very quickly and loosely I feel the crisis has led to this capital implosion is that
00:13:04
Speaker
What all the developed economies, the EU, UK and the US did was quantitative easing by pumping lots of cash back into the economy. That money has eventually landed itself. It's not necessarily made its way down to the poorest person. It's basically landed in the hands of very wealthy individuals and institutions, all of whom are now investing in the sort of startup arena, chasing
00:13:33
Speaker
return. That's the short version. You can go into the details and no answer. But essentially, all that helicopter money of QE is slowly now making its way back from startups to like getting 50 percent discount on Amazon is broadly what I see happening. And so in the end, the consumer wins. So that cash comes back into the economy. How long
00:13:58
Speaker
Is this sort of trend sustainable? There's a lot of liquidity. What happens to asset crisis? So many interesting questions, but I think that it is possibly one of those unintended consequences.
00:14:11
Speaker
Okay, so coming back to how the journey to Slub Farm happened, like, so you were in Virgin, where they were like, businesses that were getting set up, and you were on the board of a lot of them and learning about different types of businesses, different colors and flavors and sizes, and so on. So how did that lead to Slub Farm happening?
Children's Food Market in India
00:14:37
Speaker
Around the same time, I didn't have kids.
00:14:40
Speaker
Meghna had just about, like Nadeeta was, you know, she was pregnant with Nadeeta. And a lot of our friends started asking us, saying, bring back food for my child. And I remember talking to Meghna and saying, this makes no sense, right? Like, why, why are we doing this? India grows so much food. It didn't clock up.
00:15:00
Speaker
And then once Nadita was born, and we had been talking a little bit about this, and it was like, there really were no options. If you think about it, Akshay, from the time that you were a child to now, the choice on the shelf for what a baby or a child eats is pretty much the same. So there are two more answers to it. One is for the baby section, nothing has changed. Two is for the category sort of definition, right? Of food for children, say under 10 years old.
00:15:31
Speaker
It has been created in all developed countries and is slowly getting created in India. Our realization down the road, and we thought it would happen, it's now starting to happen in India, was that that shelf would get created. But on today's date, there is a dog food shelf at major retailers, but there's no children's food shelf yet.
00:15:55
Speaker
And that's coming. So that categorization or depth of category has happened in personal care, in clothing, in education and all other fronts. So it literally is just a move right towards a more developed economy towards as people have more disposable income and less time consuming more packaged food.
00:16:15
Speaker
looking for better alternatives within the packaged food space. So you could see that had played out in the UK and the EU. And actually that's why it's the idea that stuck because it was very close to what Mehtna was doing work-wise and she had by then moved back to India and actually she worked on the Bihar project, many different things. And she was like, I'm seeing these malnutrition statistics and they are really odd.
00:16:42
Speaker
And we read them so much, so we're a bit inured to them. But
Vision for Children's Nutrition
00:16:48
Speaker
the fact that one in every three or four children in India is malnourished, not just because they are poor, but because they have either got obesity, diabetes. So both ends of the spectrum is not OK. It's really not OK. And so it felt somewhere, I was telling the whole
00:17:09
Speaker
theory of zeros thing, right? I was tired of seeing zeros. I also, and so did Mingna, the reason we love working with each other is that one of the first things she ever said to me, I will never forget, is that we're going to make a really super successful business and then use the money to work at the bottom of the pyramid, right? So while by no means are we running a sort of, you know,
00:17:36
Speaker
social sector organization is very much a for-profit company. I think that it is incumbent on us to solve that larger problem eventually because I now feel I was telling Meena, I have learned so much that it can really, really, really be deployed and be used to solve sort of greater nutrition challenges. And I feel that that really was the sort of thing that nailed it for us.
00:18:05
Speaker
Where will I make an impact? Where will I make a difference? If I can change for the better how X million children eat, it's a great outcome. And we really, really need it right now. It's gotten out of control. Our children are eating way too much sugar. And I'll give you a simple anecdote. When I started, I asked my grandmother,
00:18:29
Speaker
about what were their eating habits like. And amongst the things she said that is always embedded in my memory, right? She said, of course we ate dessert, but we ate it once or twice a week. And you know, compare that to what's happening in our homes or this almost sort of every day there's a dessert, every day there's sugar, I'm talking about sugar, but there's also refined flour, maida, you know, trans fat in our food. It's just in the last 40 years we have
00:18:56
Speaker
irreversibly changed how we eat and it needs to change back. Did you have such a grand vision at that time when you were starting up or was it like you know small steps which eventually led you to where you are today in terms of a grander vision? I think that so when you say grand vision you mean
00:19:19
Speaker
wanting to affect schools? Yeah, like a big picture approach and saying, OK, this is a problem that's in India about millions of people. Always. If you go back to what Meghna and I have written in 2015, it's staying consistent.
00:19:38
Speaker
I think that the how became clearer. So I can tell you what that means, right? Like when we started, it just, I had actually already had like the first, I wouldn't call it health crisis, right? But I would say health awakening, which was that I really, at some point like started reading more about diet. And I was starting to, you know, many little things like what you call like pre-diabetes like that.
00:20:09
Speaker
Indicators and markers from working too much and you know, a life where you don't prioritize or think about your diet. And I started reading this writer called Michael Poller and then that led to like reading lots more. Really, I feel somewhere it's been a PhD of nutrition reading. But in that journey, what was very clear was that
00:20:32
Speaker
both two things. One is that the supermarket has a lot of options you shouldn't be eating at all. For example, the first time I understood baby food was that because I started eating a lot of those kids food pouches, or breakfast, because they're really super healthy, they don't have sugar in them. They're nothing additive, no preservative. If you're in a hurry, they're really, really easy. And they had oats and different fruits in the UK as a quick meal, right? If you're really like
00:21:01
Speaker
that time pressed lazy person who doesn't want to spend 15 minutes making notes. That was the first thing that the supermarket has a lot of options. The second thing was that the supermarket and companies have also solved for the problem. That packaging and advancements allow you to make products that are as good as what you need at home, but the consumer is addicted to the wrong thing. So you have to both educate and provide a better alternative so that
00:21:30
Speaker
I would say was pretty clear. I think the how became clear over time because in the beginning we actually wanted to launch a vegetable and fruit puree product in India. The kind that you see in Western markets in the supermarket. Yes. And there were two really, this is why market research is so, so, so important.
00:21:53
Speaker
We had figured a way to make it in the UK. To be honest, we'd even found the machinery to say, we'll come to India and bring that machinery to India, all of that. And two things happened. One is the pound became very expensive against the rupee just that year in like 2014, 15. So you realize that you should actually fundamentally never start a business which is exposed to FX in this.
00:22:17
Speaker
the second thing was that but your idea was just to buy the machine in the UK and get it together before we got into manufacturing our plan was to import right prototype and see if it works and then invest in the machine
00:22:35
Speaker
And you had already quit your job by the time you were going through these plans. I had and Meghna had not. We were still thinking this through. But to be honest, like in the UK, to make a prototype takes you four months, right? Yeah, it takes a lot longer sometimes. But it was like, OK, done, finished, banding done. We can launch this product. But the consumer research was telling us really different things. One was that people didn't want fruit and veg purees. They only wanted them when they travel.
00:23:04
Speaker
which is not a big enough segment, right? You're making food for 10 days a year that people are out. Like that's not great. The second thing is that Indians, you know, eat fresh food, which is better. So why are you habit changing? Really the point of where the pain point really was and where there was absolute lack of representation. And this is something Magna realized when she had her doctor is that we're not eating all of the things that we grew up eating in our own home. So there are no millets in the cereals for children.
00:23:34
Speaker
and there are now okay but at that time there were none there are no whole grains everything is highly refined highly processed and cereals make up 40 percent of your food right and so fruit and vegetable will be another sort of 30 percent we were going after one bucket but realized the need laying the other
00:23:55
Speaker
Okay. Right. And, and the interesting thing was that you have the dream and the vision, but you realize the answer is your grandmother's kitchen. That
Initial Challenges of Slurb Farm
00:24:05
Speaker
is, I think the change in the journey of what was odd and what we didn't expect was to, um,
00:24:14
Speaker
was to learn that. I remember Meghna when she had nadita and nadita used to have this ragi cereal and porridge she was like this is awesome we should do something and make something like what my grandmother is making for nadita and we should make other yummy things with ragi
00:24:33
Speaker
But she was like, I have awful childhood memories of being forced to eat Ragi. Can we just make it yummy? So then started that journey of trying to make Ragi yummy. So I went back to a childhood friend from school and she made the first from Ragi cookies.
00:24:52
Speaker
And they were delicious. But it took us 12 months to get a prototype of a cookie. And we had to use 5% Medha. You couldn't make a 0% Medha cookie. But in doing the process of that, we met and saw so many factories, so many types of people. What kind of cookie? In India. Yeah, drop machine, this machine, that machine. To be honest, I cannot eat out in most
00:25:18
Speaker
spaces and places after seeing how food actually gets made. So I cannot eat cookies off the shelf anymore. And I don't like to eat at weddings and, you know, there's certain things that you realize the back end of the food industry really needs an overhaul.
00:25:40
Speaker
So you quit your job and came to India and sustained on your savings? Or what was going on at this time? So to be honest, I would say that Slabdham was the journey of both of our savings of our 20s, early 30s, went into funding Slabdham at the start. We definitely couldn't have done it without
00:26:10
Speaker
some savings and also both our husbands didn't quit their jobs. So I moved to the UAE because my husband got a job here and Magna moved here because she was already working in McKinsey and started this I would go back and forth to Delhi which is where my parents are from and the whole sort of I would say the first sort of two years we were figuring it out right because we had actually we sort of
00:26:38
Speaker
I quit with the prototype of that theory ready. I didn't expect it for the market research to show that. So it probably took us another year and a half to work through what the first product should actually be. And I'm glad we did that. At the time it was extremely sort of painful. And actually in 2016, I want to say the very first investor we did meet,
00:27:05
Speaker
was fireside, was Kaval who saw her first serial and he's like, this, this, this is great. And we were too young and we were not ready to take on any institution at that point. So we were like, why not? You know, we're still okay right now. Like we were still bootstrapping it, still getting the product right. I would say that that sort of, I want to get the product right has been this North star in some way, I want to say.
00:27:34
Speaker
And I don't think we're still working on it. I feel like 25 products in. I'm really excited about this year because I feel like the best of product development is yet to come. And we remember one thing, neither Meghna nor I had any background in food manufacturing, nor anybody to guide us and tell us here's the shortcuts. So I think we kissed a lot of frogs.
00:28:02
Speaker
cannot tell you the number of people we met who said make a layer cake make this kind of cookie make you know just basically make versions of the same old thing you see very difficult i'll give an example it was extremely challenging to find a biscuit vendor who would be willing on scale because we found people who were doing handmade cookies but that meant that
00:28:28
Speaker
you know, you asked was it so grand? It was because it was like, oh my God, I can't scale this. And it's really not exciting if I can't do it at scale. I don't want to do it. So but then we went to the opposite end, right? We worked with someone who basically manufacturers is a manufacturer for all the large cookie brands.
00:28:49
Speaker
okay um and we did it too early i would say in hindsight it was a 180 foot oven it basically made you know 500 tons of cookies a day so our production run was done in like an hour and it was not the most efficient way to start you learn these things
00:29:05
Speaker
So sometimes actually what happens is when you start with the mad vision, you solve for the mad vision and then you realize that like slow down, build your brand and then get to the mad vision. But like the manufacturer, how did he agree to like, you know, take this bet in a way? Was it like purely a commercial transaction or was there a certain amount of convincing which you needed to do?
00:29:34
Speaker
I, so the two manufacturers who worked with us, you know, first two manufacturers, I would say what our first VCs. God bless them. They had no earthly commercial reason to work with us at the time, apart from like just a lot of
00:29:55
Speaker
tenacity and energy and conviction and convincing. And, you know, we found also in both cases, someone who knew both manufacturers in common when they spoke, spent a lot of time in remote factories, both of them. And I would say in both instances, you know, I would say to founders who also maybe just said, yeah, yeah, let's let's do this.
00:30:24
Speaker
It definitely was not for the money for either of them to start with. Right. I don't know. So many times, Akshay, we were talking, people say, was it difficult being a woman entrepreneur, all that, right? I don't think that anybody ever asked that question. So I feel, and I want to tell you this or other people this, that if you really just say, I'm going to do this, and it will come across in your meeting, right?
00:30:54
Speaker
And then you'll find somebody with the same energy and sort of kindred spirit. So the interesting thing is actually the first person that we worked with was in Jaipur. And it's a company called Down To Earth, which was one of the first organic food brands of India. And at the time, we wanted to be a 100% organic brand.
00:31:16
Speaker
And then we realized that the market demand is organic for some things, which is what we are. And it's not organic for all things. So when we worked with them, their process was all very handmade. And so we had to move sort of halfway in.
00:31:31
Speaker
because we felt we couldn't scale that. But we had a wonderful relationship, really, really fond of them. And the thing that really actually made my day is that the CEO of that company called Meghna after our last fundraise to say it all. He told us something that time. He said, no one will tell you all the answers in the first meeting.
00:31:58
Speaker
You go second, third. It's like unpeeling an onion. You won't learn all the knowledge on day one. You have to get there slowly, slowly, slowly. And in the end, you'll know all the answers and he was right. But it was great because he called her to say, you know, and this is six years on like that. Wow. Yay. Happy for you. So I would say in each case, right, there was someone like that who was an early cheerleader.
00:32:29
Speaker
So how did the actual launch happen? Like you spent two years in figuring out, you kept trying and researching and pivoting and eventually you found these manufacturers who were ready to make the product you finalize, which was a millet based cookie. So from
Go-to-Market Strategy
00:32:49
Speaker
there, tell me about how like the commercial part of Slubfarm started, you know, in terms of commercializing this product and
00:32:58
Speaker
taking it out to the market and you know, yeah, I have to talk to you about that. So firstly, I'll tell you two things. One is about the launch and then the second is about thinking through go to market strategy, right? So in terms of the launch, and this is to anyone who started a business in today's time, you have no idea how fortunate you are, because we started in 2016, but there was no GST.
00:33:25
Speaker
So of course, there were three amazing things that happened around that 2016-17 time, which were good for small new businesses like ours. One was GST itself happened. But before that, there was Amazon and BigBasket were really picking up. And the third thing that then helped us was demonetization. And I talked through all three of them. So our first sort of
00:33:50
Speaker
portals of launch was stores in in Delhi and you know remember that we are so as a company we are registered in Delhi so we were selling in stores in Delhi and it was even challenging at that point to sell in a store in Noida or Gurgaon because you have to get a C form to cross the border if you wanted to do your business legitimately right so forget going to Bombay to go to Gurgaon right and then we also did online
00:34:18
Speaker
So we launched on Amazon and big basket and Amazon had just started grocery. And that was really, really exciting. And I still remember the first time Meghna's grandmother packed all the boxes, you know, she and I drove to the warehouse to deposit our boxes and you were watching every single sale. And then I was like, my own father is buying the first 10 cookies. Can he stop all that? We were in a lot of
00:34:46
Speaker
retail stores in Delhi. So, you know, you'd hear and it was word of mouth. And I think it really started to pick up when it went beyond people, you know, who buy a product, right? That's when we went to the next journal. We went to a lot of schools. We did a lot of sampling at play areas and schools and events and fairs and pop ups and what have you. Then came GST, which was a game changer. Really like
00:35:14
Speaker
It just made it possible for young companies to trade in India as if it is one country and removed all these barriers to like big companies were set up, right? Then they had warehouses and they had these CNF agents in every state. So they were set up with the understanding of how to navigate that and we were just getting to it and it just all fell apart.
00:35:39
Speaker
So between Amazon and this entire sort of overhaul, basically you could reach a consumer in any part of India from the time that you launch. It's inconceivable.
00:35:52
Speaker
now that it was anything but but it was not and that's why I would say our early DNA was like we have to go the store route and you had no choice at that time we had no choice and I would say that was the wrong choice in the wrong DNA but we were just saying okay want to scale have to and even now you can't grow unless you grow in the store network okay
00:36:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's how I also discovered Slub Farm. Like, the first time I saw it was in a store only. Cool. I didn't know that. Where? Noida.
00:36:29
Speaker
Okay, I'm happy something worked. But I mean, I fundamentally believe in the end, we will have to be offline focused. Okay, that's where you get volume. And people feel I enjoy going to the store to shop. So that's not going away. It's just that COVID I mean, has added another dimension. And anyway, so later in 2016-17, right with demonetization, it basically it's really
00:36:51
Speaker
made it a level playing field. Because there was no more, we never, we actually have to have the Ulta problem, right? People used to be like, give us cash. And we'd be like, oh, man, we have to go to the bank and cash from the bank. So how do I do that? That was always a pain. I have not had to deal with that at all since. And that's for newer age businesses, it's just, it's made the ease of doing business go up to
00:37:20
Speaker
to what it should be and is in other parts of the world. And so that was the sort of how we started. Then in terms of go-to-market, our initial emphasis was on building this big offline sort of network, I would say. And that, I would say, was the biggest learning of Mina and my life in some sense, because
00:37:47
Speaker
The thing that people don't say, right, you come from these very coppery jobs, McKinsey, JP Morgan, all that. And then you have to go and build a Salesforce which is motivated entirely differently to anything you have been exposed to or used to. And we started in Delhi, then we tried to do in Bangalore and Bombay. I even moved to Bangalore for six months to try to set up an offline Salesforce there. And I just, you know,
00:38:15
Speaker
If I were to be honest, I failed at it. On a grand scale, I had no understanding of how to do this, but I did visit 200 stores all over Bangalore. That was one positive point. I got to spend time with my mother who was also there for that duration of time. So it was nice.
00:38:37
Speaker
I would say that there was a very challenging 18 month period of the journey of Slope Farm where we tried to grow offline and it sucks cash. And the issue is that no one pays you cash. Okay. No one pays you back. I would sometimes should tell Meghna, this is ridiculous. And you know, my husband used to laugh at me cause he'd be like, your Sunday's you're only calling people to be like,
00:39:05
Speaker
That was my spending day. And we would literally be sending someone once, twice, thrice. So the cost of getting your money back was probably equivalent to what that person was paying you. And I think that until COVID has made things so much clearer. But having said that, what trying to build offline taught us is
00:39:29
Speaker
A, how the system works. So, you know, when we go back to it, we will understand it. B, I think we did a lot of offline events. So we used to have a calendar across. We basically went and hired an offline events team. And we never outsourced this to third parties because you felt it is always best in-house. And literally, I think we had some of the most amazing mums of India, all of whom called us up and said, I really believe in what you're doing.
00:39:59
Speaker
I want to join you. So I went to team in Bangalore, had Sakshi.
00:40:05
Speaker
And, you know, in Bombay, we had Shraddha who also heads our online business, but would do events. And in Delhi, it was the whole team. There was Vaishali and Pankuri and, you know, the rest of the whole office. And I would say that at one point we were doing four to five events a week. And by that, I mean, you know, all these children's events or mommy pop-ups, I don't know if you're ever into that world, but they're incredibly powerful sources of discovery of brands.
00:40:33
Speaker
Okay. I've never attended one of these type of events. If I'm really honest, I don't think I would have, but for Slope Firm. And, but it is incredible because, you know, people when they have young children want to find ways to buy products and it's lots of these events exist.
00:40:53
Speaker
And we planned out and we did them. These are like slightly more like for well to do audience or is it like a Mila in a park type of a thing or is it an event in a mall? So you'll have the more high end ones which are often in hotels. Then you'll have the more mass ones which will be in an entertainment space or a big wide open park or open to everybody. Then you'll have those that are in a mall and
00:41:21
Speaker
I really miss them because there was, I was counting with Meena, both she and I used to do 30, 40 a year and I have done them in Hyderabad, in Chennai, in in Kochi, in Bangalore, in Delhi, in Bombay because there's a best way for you to keep speaking to your consumer, right? To understand what are they saying? What are they, how do they buy? What gets through? You'd be like giving out samples of your cookies and... Yeah, like selling at a stall. Selling at a stall. Okay.
00:41:50
Speaker
And also directing them like buy this from Amazon or something like that. Yeah, correct. And at the same time you would get feedback and understand what are their needs and things like that. Correct. And it's such a nice direct way of doing it, right? Like people, you're standing there and no one cares like whether you're the mum who started the company or not. They'll just tell you what they think and it's the most honest, amazing feedback.
00:42:21
Speaker
So we did a lot of that, we did a lot of stores selling, we did a lot of feedback getting it made us change our products a lot. We kept refining, kept refining the product and I think along the way we wanted to do a website. So we did, we launched our own website and I must say it took us I don't know like close to what
00:42:41
Speaker
14 months to get a website up. That's how little Megan and I understood digital when we started. But why 14 months? I mean, like you could have got a vendor to give you something in a couple of weeks. I think that you learn right along the way many things. You learn many things. I'm just going to put it down to that. So I would say that you also learn like I mean, you could today I can tell you I can make you a cookie product in two months.
00:43:12
Speaker
I can make your website now in two months, but that was not the case then. So I think, you know, everything takes its journey. Maybe sometimes identify the wrong vendor, right? Who themselves doesn't know how to build a website. So all of that happened. And I think what at the end of it, right, we were sort of COVID was a pivotal point if I jumped the story a little bit.
00:43:39
Speaker
In that our
Fundraising and Digital Shift
00:43:40
Speaker
first fundraise was a very much friends and family fundraise.
00:43:45
Speaker
Which year was that first one? 2018. Okay. It was actually a really fun moment in itself. Every single person had either called us off the back of an envelope. Sorry, the sort of the packaging, right? Packaging. Two people called the consumer headline, or the people who were friends or family and loved the product and had said, when you raise, please call me. So, you know, and
00:44:14
Speaker
I was pregnant, six months pregnant during my fundraise. It never came up. It closed in two months. It was a very not a lot of like conversation kind of fundraise and it really to us was like the sort of
00:44:28
Speaker
gave us the ability to experiment at offline. And then sort of get that website up, never realized how important it would be because I still feel that the e-commerce portals are a very important part of food especially. And that's because you might go to a website to buy clothes,
00:44:58
Speaker
but your food you still buy as part of your bigger basket. See my dude for a child when they're very young, but over time, basically, you buy, do all your shopping in one go. You don't always take the time. I'd go buy my sort of running trainers maybe on a D2C website. So the jewelry is still out there, right? And I feel like the world is gonna move to digital and we have to engage with all platforms of digital.
00:45:28
Speaker
But what happened in the first three months, COVID hit and we had nothing and no one who was willing to place an order with us in those first three months. Maybe many people have said this to you in the course of your podcasts. I don't know what your experience has been with others, but March, April was very scary times.
00:45:54
Speaker
Yeah, so I've spoken to people from other categories, like P safe, for example, saw spurt in orders, but then their product is different, you know, so. So we saw a massive spurt in orders after the lockdown ended. Okay. So initially there was a fear of contamination. So people were afraid to order anything from outside at all, I guess. Correct. So March, April, what happened was that we essentially saw
00:46:24
Speaker
you know, lockdown happened, Amazon big basket stopped placing orders of anything, stores stopped paying vendors. There's a lot of that was happening. There's just chaos in the market. Then what kind of monthly run rate are you at before COVID hit like the monthly top line? A monthly run rate, you know, I can share a few numbers before COVID was sort of at around 40 lakhs, 50 lakhs a month. It is now closer to the
00:46:52
Speaker
1.2 crores a month number and that jump happened I would say because of embracing digital in a bigger way but equally that you know what the interesting thing is it's also simpler right it's that when you are going in a store
00:47:12
Speaker
If a new brand doesn't have shelf space, they'll never get seen. Whereas now that most people have switched to shopping digital, you search for a brand you might have seen or you'll see an ad and you'll buy it. So it's easier to get discovered and then hopefully build long-term resonance. So I would definitely say COVID helped us grow hugely, hugely. But in the early days, it was very scary and
00:47:39
Speaker
For, you know, for some of the other brands that you may have spoken to, which are digital, they didn't have to make a business change. We had to make a business change. We basically had to cut out an entire offline business. What percentage was offline, like in Jan? 50% of it, right. And it's, it has not really grown since then. So, and in fact, it has de-grown and we are just have decided that
00:48:05
Speaker
we are until this whole situation calms down going to focus big time on digital also because you get paid upfront or on time one of the two right on your website you get paid before you ship on on marketplace you get paid within 30 days that is not the case with traditional retail and it's very challenging to manage that
00:48:30
Speaker
But you would be working with like a like an agency that would further supply to retail so that agency would pay you like is that how it happens like in terms of offline retail? No, you work with a distributor and we work with many distributors directly. Of course, you can also work with like a
00:48:50
Speaker
you know, more meta distributors. So basically, there'll be one guy who aggregates other distributors. We didn't do that model yet. And to be honest, like at the start, it is hard for new brands to do that. Because you have to build some market recognition. And you won't get shelf space, like your product will just be languishing somewhere. No, we often did a PhD almost on like shelf in store shelf collateral, right? So right from how do you appear visible to the
00:49:19
Speaker
tape, to the sticker, to the, I mean, all kinds of merchandising I had never heard of or thought of or realized that anyone was deploying on me. I never thought so hard on intent of being an in-store shopper. And think about it to someone who's basically your grocery buying experience becomes like 20x more nuanced.
00:49:49
Speaker
I can't, I literally, I walk into a grocery store now, I can spend hours. And it's not, but like, I will notice every, yeah, other people's packaging, sampling, merchandising, what's going on. I really, really enjoy it.
00:50:06
Speaker
So what has been the, you were telling me about the funding journey, like in 2018, you had a friends and family round, which you closed in two months without much of a challenge in that. So from that to now, when you have Fireside as a backer, how did that happen? So I would say Fireside is the first fund that we ever spoke to.
00:50:33
Speaker
And we didn't really do a lot of pitches as such. At some point, like the second fundraise happened fairly easily. And it took us sort of about two years to run through that cash. Actually, when COVID hit, we had just about started to fundraise.
00:50:53
Speaker
COVID happened and we ran out of cash basically because when no one pays you, you burn cash twice as fast, right? If you're burning whatever, X a month, you start to burn 2x, 3x because no money is coming back. Plus we saw that there's going to be a spike, but then you need money to invest in inventory. Then you have no money for marketing. So it was like many things hit you all at once.
00:51:20
Speaker
So actually, we were at that point where Megan and I put money back in the business. Because we just thought it's going to be so hard to fundraise right now in the middle of COVID, not a great time. And the interesting thing that happened, Akshay, is that we turned P&L positive. So cashflow positive takes you time because you have debts and debtors who haven't paid you and employees who you had to cut a business outright. We cut our offline business so you have to pay people.
00:51:50
Speaker
But on a penal basis, we turned positive. Which month? From June onwards. So April, May was very scary. June onwards, we started to like, because you are forced to operate in discipline. So we stopped making all the products and didn't make money. We stopped shipping like puff pouches. We stopped making our cookies, which we were not breaking even on because they were real butter cookies and
00:52:18
Speaker
You know, that doesn't make you money unless you sell them for a lot more money. We stopped working with any vendor who didn't pay us on time. Okay. I would say things that you're scared to do in good times and you feel like you must do them to grow a business. All of that just came down to, sorry, I don't have, I don't have the cash to do this. And I cannot, you know, there was, I had a friend who's a dear mentor.
00:52:46
Speaker
He sat me down and he said, okay, if you have to run this company with just you and Meghna, can you do it? It came to that, right? Then one person, then two people, then three people, then four people. So you really start to think about what you've built something and what is essential. I think that discipline really, really, really helped us. And you realize that even when you're running a very, very tight show, there are layers of fat you can cut.
00:53:16
Speaker
which is what got us to break even and then our revenue started to grow because of greater digital adoption because we started to do like Uman who's the third co-founder started to really really I mean I would say from a marketing branding perspective the brand has really grown up
00:53:37
Speaker
and coming to its own. And he's all of that, right? And he's built a team. And interestingly, we don't have a team anymore. We don't have a physical office. We shut it in March, April, I want to say, because we were like, this is not ending. And he has moved to Goa from Delhi. And now I would say the most number of
00:54:01
Speaker
people working in an office at Slope Farm are in Goa. So I keep joking and telling him that if I had known that the place where you live would become so important to the company, I would have asked him to not live in such a remote village. Because you walk out of his house and there is a gown outside. And that's where the office is, because he's rented another apartment in the same building, which is the Slope Farm office.
00:54:30
Speaker
But that's what covid has meant. Everybody's remote. And. Completely different company. I am, I'm very sorry, but in the like enjoying our conversation, I forgot what you asked me. I suspect you have the funding. So you told me you became P&L positive. And yeah, OK, so it's in the middle of that. I got a message from Fireside.
00:54:59
Speaker
And I will tell you something funny about Migna, which she will kill me for saying, but she basically like, if someone like who's the analyst on the team at a fund messages me, I don't respond because she's like, I don't see my kids, right? So she doesn't say like, I don't have time to spend with my daughter. You don't have time to spend with your kids. So if a very young child is messaging me, I'll just not want to reply. So it was a very young child and she didn't reply.
00:55:39
Speaker
But you know, I still laugh at her, but I have realized one thing. She's right because you need to conserve your energy, right? You could waste a lot of time. We've had
00:55:48
Speaker
we don't waste that much energy on fundraising conversations. And I would say maybe that changes as you grow a business. But that was it. We had a conversation we had met four years ago. So it was really nice. It was, you know, even from the five side end, they said, you know, this is the first time we're funding without doing the in person meeting.
00:56:12
Speaker
But we had met many times in 2016. And it's really nice. It feels almost... I was telling Meghna, maybe sometimes, you know, you're meant to do something and the timing is just off. So this was like an inbound inquiry of funding, which is pretty amazing. And especially given that it was probably amongst the toughest times for most startups. Yeah. But, you know, if you look back at 2020 in hindsight, right, any brand that was
00:56:43
Speaker
sort of able to grow in that time, did so. It was also a good time. So it was a very tough year and it ended on a good note and we're very excited about 2021 because on the one hand, it's really nice to have an institution which really just gets the market.
00:57:03
Speaker
And I think if I were to share one piece of advice for anyone who's listening this long into the conversation, it is that when you start, you do not understand the benefit that an institutional investor does bring. And a lot of that, depending, you know, hoping
00:57:24
Speaker
You have to make the right choice of person and team and vision. And it has to match. It really has to match. Fundamentally, it has to match. But when it does, it's great because you now have another partner sounding board for all of your sort of thinking and vision for growing. It's great. And I would say we've been really lucky because a lot of our early investors were like that. As in they were bringing in more than just money.
00:57:54
Speaker
Yes. And we took people who, to be honest, we could have done a far bigger fundraise even then. And people wanted to give more money, but we wanted people's intellect over money. So every person contributed something. I'm just 13 people, so I can't do justice to all of them. I don't want to say, you know, go, go individually. But like, there are people who have given us time by being in the office for days on end and
00:58:23
Speaker
sitting with the team and thinking through org structure and really pulling their weight behind that. I would say there were others who are founders themselves who whenever I need help choosing like an agency or thinking through something creative and marketing related have been great. There are people who
00:58:41
Speaker
one of them you know when I was in London spent a lot of time talking to me just this was in sort of 2017 2018 saying go digital now now now now all the time right and was like have you seen Bonobo have you seen Bobby Parker and I was like I have no idea what that is in this you know they're all US businesses so didn't really really live in that San Francisco
00:59:03
Speaker
why be the so that was really useful. I can't like literally everybody added something right, right from someone who helped us with logistics to someone who helped us think through other fundraising conversations to people who read pitch decks and pitch books. And I think that it's at the end of it, it's been a very nice sort of you have that first round, which is like your friends and family that you can always cry on their shoulders amid.
00:59:30
Speaker
And then next round, which is really the institution which brings the force of taking a vision to where you want to take it. Right. Right. And in the course of that, you kind of also pivot your product, perfect your product. Right. That's also important. That's also important because your first day product is not like it needs a lot of help and you're not willing to see that as an entrepreneur sometimes.
01:00:01
Speaker
which is what I want to ask you next about the product journey like you started with cookies tell us about the journey from cookies to what all you do today so I was making a matrix of things
01:00:16
Speaker
like learning
Product Evolution and Development
01:00:17
Speaker
journeys. So I would definitely say cookies and offline was in the, why did you do that box? And I remember thinking because the cookies were never unit positive. And that's because of the scale of manufacturing, actually. Like if we were to run the full day of the factory, we would have made money, but we were not able to scale to that run size.
01:00:44
Speaker
So essentially it's a demand issue then. There was not like a large enough demand. No one can generate 400 tons of demand on day one. So maybe in like two years time I should go back to that. But it was like, it was like, because you want to make a, you know, I think what happens.
01:01:01
Speaker
very honestly is there was Meghana and Swaravi thinking everything at scale right the advice you give your client is think at this like mad scale so then you start to apply you had the JP Morgan mindset yeah but it doesn't work because you're like sending your client an NDA on day one and this is India so they're laughing at you saying what's wrong with you or making these long long agreements and they're like we don't sign agreement so there was a lot of that we made like QC manuals
01:01:29
Speaker
So much stuff right and we were always trying to think oh my god, you're gonna get to like this If you don't change a nutrition outcome for a large enough number of people It just isn't exciting for both of us. So in terms of the product journey, we started with the cereals actually and
01:01:50
Speaker
But we added the cookies because we felt, remember we were thinking offline, that you would never be able to sample your product if you didn't have something that a customer can taste. So when you're sitting in the store, I can't just put the cereal on the shelf and then not be like, hey, I also have a cookie, try it.
01:02:10
Speaker
Difficult to make a cereal and give it to a consumer. Even at an event, you get talking because someone tries your cookie. And it was a really yummy cookie. It was on AirAsia. We put it on a bunch of different hotels and airlines. Even adults loved it. And then we sort of grew in that whole cereal space. So we had three to start with. Today, we have almost 12.
01:02:34
Speaker
you really want to expand that space. I think the other thing we realized you know because I didn't have any kids when we started and now I have two and I would say all of the repertoire of things that I fed my kids for breakfast on Nandita which is Meghna's daughter who was fed for breakfast have made it to the list of things that Slope Farm makes.
01:02:57
Speaker
you know nut powder which is like the three nuts and put saffron in it and it's something that our kids were given with their cereal is a product we make and it's really really really
01:03:09
Speaker
We tried to do the best quality version of it, right? Or we sell a jaggery, which is what I prefer to use even for having chai at home and really nice jaggery. So it sells really well because once people buy it, they know it's hard to find that. We make sprouted ragi because that was not one of the things. We just make sprouted ragi by itself because it's such an amazing thing for children to eat and
01:03:35
Speaker
again in our house we eat it even rotis made with that so as in like a sprouted ragi powder which can be used for anything like a atta basically it can be used for atta or cereal both um i would say that as we evolved a lot of our own food eating habits entered the lexicon of the products we make and then a lot of in the beginning our cereals were really really there was zero processing happening right so they were not instant and people
01:04:02
Speaker
People found that so hard that they started baking cakes with the baby cereal and making pancakes. And we were like, shit. Firstly, we need to fix the product. But why don't we make pancakes and dosa anyway? So because it's the second thing a child eats after a cereal, you know, like you have children. So a lot of this sort of baby-led weaning culture started and children eat real food much younger, which is great. So we started making millet dosas and millet pancakes.
01:04:32
Speaker
And again, it was like a which is how I discovered so far through the the beetroot and the palak dosas. I'm so happy. And there's always that confusion now, right? There's a lot of adults like it. And somehow the packaging makes adults feel like they can't eat it. And I would say that is the core dilemma that sometimes among me when I grapple with in that if you had something which was more adult looking, it would be lost as a brand. You would not stand out.
01:05:01
Speaker
with that sort of fun and creativity and that I don't know the branding which we all enjoy actually and a lot has gone into the branding I can talk to you a little bit about that adults can eat it but kids love it and I actually think that the reason we have stuck with the child space is that people make habit change with their children first and children are always the first
01:05:26
Speaker
starting point right like no firecrackers started with children or even so many environmental concerns they start with children and this return to eating healthy is going to start with our kids and i actually think after return to eating healthy will be like a
01:05:41
Speaker
stop using your mobile device we'll start with our kids so probably things like privacy you know all that stuff yeah yeah absolutely yeah but more so even my child already tells me mommy get off your phone like so they really they really really get it as kids and i feel if i say one thing and i was telling my mom the other day when i was growing up
01:06:04
Speaker
and you were growing up, there was no conception that this is too much sugar. We didn't correlate. So like, you know, I used to love to go to Bangalore for summer holidays because the bread there was sweeter. Now I didn't think that the bread is sweeter cause someone's putting sugar in it. I just thought milky bread, like you just didn't make that simple correlation. Why is the bread tastier? And it's probably, it's not good for you because it's tastier. It just tastes tastier. So it was like eating cake broadly. And I don't know if you know what I mean, but in Bangalore,
01:06:34
Speaker
the bread is like smaller and tastes very different to the way like a modern bread of Delhi will taste. Okay, no, I'm not aware. Yeah, I mean, someone who spent a bit of time understands the distinction. But you know, we were given nimupani with like four or five teaspoons of sugar as much tank as you want. So we ate a very heavy diet of fruit and vegetable, but there was no control on the aspect of sugar because no one understood it. And
01:07:02
Speaker
dialing
Future Plans and Expansion
01:07:03
Speaker
that back has to start with these kids they just have to eat less of it so we moved from doing cereals to pancake and dosa then we
01:07:12
Speaker
also made these puff snacks. And then again, every point as our kids grew older, we could see the need, we started making different products. I didn't, we went to holiday in court and my son was like, mommy, can I have chocos? I've never had them in my life. And they didn't allow me. So I was like, of course I felt bad. And I said, yes. And I got talking after that. And I said, listen, you know, we should make something that is a better version.
01:07:38
Speaker
Then we started getting into a lot of super foods that we felt children should eat and we eat at home a lot. So right from a chia seed to eating the snack powder and the jaggery and the sprouted jagi and to eating like an oat powder, brown rice powder which you can use in different ways in your food. Then during COVID our kids were baking a lot. So I was like Megha let's make some nice cake mixes because kids are sitting at home
01:08:06
Speaker
I would be, you know, working in, literally next door in the kitchen, like a very unhealthy cake was getting baked every day. That started next, we're going to actually get into doing a lot of the core sort of millet itself and some flowers. So like, basically you want to make a pizza base or whatever you want to do with it or whatever you can go from making a cake to anything with it.
01:08:33
Speaker
Like Kosh, I think I've seen Kosh as a brand which has that kind of those different kinds of artists.
01:08:41
Speaker
I have not seen that particular brand, but there are many people doing it. I think a big bazaar brand or something. I only see it in big bazaar stores. OK, I'm going to check it out after. But you know, so that sort of that sort of been the evolution of the product journey. And it's really trying to address a child under 10 in every possible thing. We're also going to do a really awesome drink, which we had made about three years ago, I want to say.
01:09:10
Speaker
Okay. And we always felt we are not going to launch this because how many, you know, that's a very defined space, but I feel now people have the awareness post COVID to engage with.
01:09:22
Speaker
an immunity drink or a daily milk mixing. Really, it's a milk mixing. OK. So it's like a Bonvita substitute. Yes. Yeah. Lots of fun ideas of what's coming. What about a Maggie substitute? And this is me as a parent making a demand. You know, you're so spot on. You're so spot on. It's there. Again, I'm going to send you after this really nice chat I've had with you. We had done the branding for like a fun range of millet noodles.
01:09:51
Speaker
I would say that we need to find a stable manufacturer of that product and it has to be up to scratch. Wow, I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, me too actually. It's like that one thing, no, it doesn't ever, there's nothing like a bowl of noodles on a duff day. So tell me about Umang. We didn't talk about how he became a co-founder.
01:10:21
Speaker
Um, so among his, I mean, among has always been a co-founder. It's, we keep joking saying two mothers and a brother doesn't sound cool on the pack. So it says two mothers. Um, okay. He's your brother. No, he's my best friend to his, you know, displeasure since we were four or five years old, we've known each other. Um, we went to school together. I've probably terrorized him much of my school years and, uh,
01:10:52
Speaker
when we started this, I called him and said, Come on, let's do it. And I think he didn't know what he was getting into is my sense. So he said, Yeah, what was he doing before he joined you? He's a graphic designer and a video artist by training, I always get describing what he does wrong. So he's always cranking. He used to, you know, work in a graphic design firm started by his father, at the age of 30.
01:11:22
Speaker
31 to do all of us quit our jobs, him included. Cause he said, I never want to manage people again. I just want to, yeah. So he very clear that I don't want to do that. And, um, and I, you know, at some part of, part of him also wanted to be a full-time artist. And, and, and now he has really gotten into Ayurveda and studying the Vedas.
01:11:52
Speaker
So I am being sent a lot of material to read, but I would say one is the soul of Slurpham. Always has been. And he's the creative mind behind the packaging design and all the characters on the design. Yeah. Yeah. And he sort of the brand looks the way it does because of him. He also does all of the communication.
01:12:20
Speaker
you know, visual communication of a brand is all him. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me for his number, I would be very rich. Which company can I call them? And from all ages and stages and people have asked me this. And they don't sometimes believe me when I'm like, you know, he doesn't do this as a job. And so, you know, Slapam, I would say is the only sort of
01:12:49
Speaker
graphic design and video communication project to Mung has done in recent times, but he's worked with several very big brands. He has done projects for IDEO, but also for ITC for very long. And I can't say because he's my oldest friend, but I think he's a genius. He has his way of seeing things with utter clarity that I wish I possessed.
01:13:19
Speaker
And Meghna and I are very lucky to have him. When you asked him to join you, did you know that Slavaam will be like a design first kind of a brand and how pivotal his role would be, or it just happened to work out like that? No, I think he always knew that. And it's always also been that by design, right? You can choose to do this without that. So there are many brands that are not design first.
01:13:48
Speaker
And they are very successful. So it's not to say that it's a core ingredient of what you ought to do. I would say it's a core ingredient of what brings us joy. That creative process, you can outsource it to an agency where I really don't know if I'd have fun doing it. And there are several differences and points of opinion. And we debate them so openly. It's a lot of fun.
01:14:19
Speaker
And I would say, so everything has a lot of thought that goes into it. There are seven animals in the Slatwam branding. They're all animals of India. So there's a rhinoceros, there's an elephant, there's a monkey, there's a tiger, there's a bear, there's a tota. So it was to choose these animals and this year we're going to do what we have always dream dreamt of doing.
01:14:44
Speaker
which is bring these storybooks alive because I felt that for a brand to be also able to reach us, our consumer and customer are two different people. And really engage with the consumer. We also want to tell stories. I love storybooks, kids.
01:15:02
Speaker
So that was the intent probably six years ago, and it'll happen now. But it was always there. To do cookbooks was always there. So I would say that many projects that have been brewing in our head. So when you asked, was that vision always there? Yeah, there was always a mad vision. There was always a design first, love and thinking. And I think what was not there was the understanding of how much time it does take. See, you either have to have a lot of time or a lot of money, you know?
01:15:35
Speaker
Right, right. So you're going to create like a storybooks featuring slob farm characters and like get a publisher to launch them. Yeah. That's pretty amazing.
01:15:51
Speaker
I mean, I can imagine my kid getting excited about Slurpharm, the food product, if he has read Slurpharm books. I mean, you know, books with Slurpharm characters, the way, like, if he sees anything which has Snoopy on it, he'll want to buy it, you know, irrespective. It's a chocolate or a biscuit. Exactly, right. And like, okay, if I'm to ask you, what are some of your kids' favorite books? What are they?
01:16:16
Speaker
Yeah, Peanuts and Thomas the Train, that's what he's currently obsessing with. Same. My child lived on Thomas and I feel like there needs to be some of these iconic books for children which are Indian. Right. We have so many of these stories and characters. Of course, yes, things like Thomas and Pepper have so much money thrown behind them also over time, but even some of the
01:16:43
Speaker
books that you will encounter as your children grow up that every child seems to have. There needs to be that Indian version of them, really. You can be very excited right from your board book and your ABC book to your storytelling book to your just fun stories about eating, all of that. So let's see.
01:17:12
Speaker
I would imagine that an investor might wonder because you know you're from an investment banking background and you know that you know that thesis on core competencies and they might feel that why you're going outside of your core competency into an unrelated area like did you face any pushback of that like when you talked about this plan to make books
01:17:38
Speaker
It's not going outside of core competency, it exists within the team. Both the illustration, the putting together, both the person writing it is inherent to Slope Farm today. And now your digital actually, what you do need is more things to sell on your website to the same customer. Between Amazon and my website, I have a CAC
01:18:03
Speaker
that I'm paying like cost of customer acquisition for the ad to pay them to my side. Really the goal is I don't need 25 things. I need a hundred things and I need to do them as inventory light way as possible. So no, I mean, I think it is very much in sync with what the brand needs to do to establish, you know, if you take a 90 year view to things, none of these things seem like that scary. Right.
01:18:33
Speaker
And really I want to be where some of the big food brands are today. I might not be around, but you have to do all these things. Inspiring. So what percentage of your sales comes from your own website as on date? Uh, just under a third. Okay. And how, how do you like drive sales? Is it like Facebook ads and stuff like that?
01:19:02
Speaker
Yeah, ads, Instagram, Facebook. We also have a lot of repeat customers. The thing that works for all Indian consumers, discount. I think right now we're also in the phase where we are wanting more and more people to try. And so we do a sale every few months, not too often. It's more like a way to say,
01:19:30
Speaker
See, either you'd be getting to a customer by sampling them, or you do some kind of discount lit strategy, and then now we're trying to do a mix of both, right? So for me also, I respond really well to this. When someone sends me a sample, I try the product and I like it. I use it every single day. There are a few products in my fridge today that are like that. So the power of sampling is huge.
01:19:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's true. So Slurfam is like, you know, if I had to give it a label, then I would say like, it's a D2C digital native brand. You know, what
Importance of Digital Presence
01:20:14
Speaker
do you think that means, and especially in the context of India? So I think that D2C is pretty much the acronym of the season, right? And
01:20:28
Speaker
while it is seen as wow something different to do it really is about embracing a new medium to do the same thing that all other mediums do right whether you're engaging with someone through a events based or a gifting based or an offline store paradigm your online medium is helping to reach your customers so it's you cannot put it in a bucket and say i will do
01:20:57
Speaker
one and not the others eventually. But you can, I think what D2C has done has given brands the ability to do a very quick go-to-market test product hypothesis and then continue to build awareness and engagement digitally. And this is by the very fact that the infrastructure around this whole space
01:21:20
Speaker
And there's a really fun blog that I like a lot called basically Shopify is arming the rebels. And there is the whole sort of infrastructure of the D2C space has come across and grown up in India in the last, I would say two, three, four years. And right from the platform where you will put your products on to the fact that there will be warehousing and logistics that you need to think of.
01:21:50
Speaker
to the sort of complexity of what is your consumer thinking of, right? They want, why do people shop online? They shop online because they perceive better prices and they want quick delivery. How do you make that happen? To how do you think at the core of it around building engagement with your customer and, you know, is there an offline element to it and an online element to it? But all of this is possible for companies to do with less
01:22:18
Speaker
I would say money and less pain and headache as the offline channel gives you. So really the big explosion of D2C has been in the plethora of people who are now also a part of this value chain. So right from earlier in the beginning, you may have had like a FedEx and they may not have had the systems in place, but then now you have delivery and delivery is geared towards helping.
01:22:49
Speaker
startups and startup systems and great is the reason why we were able to get up on our feet again after COVID or whole like world of warehousing and the whole world of so when we talk about it we only talk about the Facebook Instagram and the funding right but there is like this bigger world behind making that machinery work
01:23:11
Speaker
And it's really exciting because that machinery is coming alive in India now. So you will soon have almost a parallel system. So your marketplaces have built a system. They have their own warehouses, own logistics, you supply them. But then you can also exist in your own ecosystem. So I think it's a very, very exciting sort of almost second way.
01:23:37
Speaker
in the online space and more than anything, I think, depending on the category you're in. So there are some categories where it's like, I don't know if I'm selling a more commoditized product or something, which is very much about make the sale move on, right? But for brands like ours, it's also about a platform to tell your story.
01:23:58
Speaker
When someone comes to my site, they get a lot more information. They get to see videos. They get to see what's behind the brand. They get to see and learn a little bit more and get a sense of that thing. And at the end of the day, we might say human beings don't respond to branding, but we do. It's not about taking a name and a logo and stamping it on a product, right? A brand is the heart and soul and imagination of what goes into it.
01:24:28
Speaker
And digital is a medium to help you tell that story better because and it's a wonderful medium. So I don't think that you can very soon this line will blur. Now it's like D2C, D2C. So you'll have food companies and food tech companies, right? Everybody will have to be a food tech company. And then it'll be the next stage. So like, you know, it's that wave. And we are in the midst of that wave and it's a very exciting time.
01:24:56
Speaker
So that was Shorvi's insightful take on building up a new-age D2C brand. And if you'd like to try out the delicious range of Slurp Farm products, then do check out their website Slurpfarm.com. That's S-L-U-R-R-P farm.com.
01:25:16
Speaker
If you like the Founder Thesis Podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like Marketing, Technology, Career Advice, Books and Drama. Visit thebotium.in that is T-H-E-P-O-D-I-U-N.I-N for a complete list of all our shows.