We are surrounded by brands, from the device in your hand to the mattress you sleep on. At brands decoded, two well-known investors Rahul Gupta and Zoeb Ali Khan chat with some of the top consumer brand founders and try to decode what goes behind building a brand, showcase it, and amplify it.
With its latest season, Brands Decoded Podcast attempts to bring out nuances of building a brand, how founders and teams do it, and how they make space in your memory and ensure you try the product.
“At Sauce, brands have been at the core of what we do and understand – driven by supporting the passion and ideas of our founders,” said Zoeb Ali Khan, Investor, Sauve VC. He added that so far being digital-first has enabled new-age brands to level the playing field and now we’re excited to partner with some of the evolving use cases for brands such as with NFTs, collectibles, virtual brand experiences, DAOs.
The podcast series by Rahul & Zoeb has fun & honest conversations with some of the coolest consumer brand founders on what they are upto? Here are some founders said, like Shashank Mehta, CEO and Founder Whole Truth Foods shared that Initially it was just a logo, or colors etc (to help identify) whereas now brands stand for trust and a fundamental human insight.
Rahul Gupta
For becoming a household name, Chakradhar Gade, Co-founder , said that listening to your customer, solving the customer’s problems, aiming for customer delight,that’s your bread and butter. “You need to keep focusing on giving the products to the customer that you promised you will give,” he added.
Another household name, Vadham Teas, focused on making the brand synonymous with a standard. Its CEO and Founder Bala Sarda said that right from the early days, I kept debating what would be a good name for a brand. “Having discussed this with a friend of mine, he gave me the example of Swarovski -if you take away what swarovski has built today, you could argue it would be the most weird name we could think of but instead its literally the name for diamond standard right,” he added.
Some other highlights from the podcasts are like what Rohan Mirchandani, CEO and Co-founder of DRUMS Food International, said, “whenever we raised capital… There were conversations of why we didn’t set up a manufacturing facility. We were one of few that didn’t set up a manufacturing facility,but instead set up an R&D lab; because we said that’s who we are, we’re not manufacturers, we’re innovators.”
The podcast highlighted quite a many profound ethos of building a great brand. Like Tarun Sharma, Co-founder said, “the lesser the difference between the psychological and physiological aspects of a brand, the sharper it is, giving it more chances to the right to exist.”
And, Ashwajeet Singh and Ajai Thandi, ’s quote that, “Our Idea is to make things convenient for the consumers and push the envelope as opposed to just seeing things from the west and making an Indianized version of it.”
Some interesting concept were touched too, like, “the concept of free trial is based on the First Fundamental of Access – if we are able to make the customers try our product, then we’ll be able to scale the business positively,” said Amit Chaudhary, Co-founder Lenskart. And that the “Rome’s not built overnight, it is something that one has to work towards. I think that Juicy Chemistry did a lot of small things right as far as building consumer trust is concerned,” said Pritsher Asher, Co-founder Juicy Chemistry.
For some the branding has come from failures-first journey. Arjun Vaidya, Ventures Lead (Verlinvest) and former CEO of Dr. Vaidya’s shared that his first venture was his biggest failure and he was totally shaken up by it, but that is a great part about entrepreneurship, it levels you very quickly; “So I consider myself very lucky to have had that failure early on in my journey,” he added.
This series of podcasts brings out the key ingredients you would need to check to scale a brand and the need of doing so. As Rahul Gupta, Investor, Times Internet, concluded that both brands & consumer needs are emerging at an unbelievable speed, these brands would need an entire tech stack as they scale, the current software aren’t meant for digitally native, hyper growing brands and “hence, I’m very bullish both and looking to back these tech enablers, that will allow brands to serve millions of customers happily”.
