The founder and manging partner of Fireside Ventures bucked the trend when he bet big on digital consumer brands in the country
Early-stage investor Kanwaljit Singh is credited with scaling-up dozens of new-age consumer startups over the past seven years. With unconventional strategies, the 'kingmaker', as Singh is fondly called, has bucked the trend and bet on digital brands to redefine the direct-to-consumer (D2C) landscape in the country.
"There was a way to disrupt how brands were built. But there was no real knowledge on the ground about how to do it. My conviction was we can build great brands, establish playbooks to help these companies succeed, and demonstrate that an early-stage fund can be built around this theme," the founder and manging partner of Fireside Ventures says in a recent interview on Forbes India Pathbreakers.In a free-wheeling conversation, Singh talks about why D2C is an interesting opportunity for investors and how Indian entrepreneurs can leverage this medium to build iconic global brands in the coming decade. Edited excerpts:
The idea of Fireside was born on the hypothesis that there is a market and there is a consumer, but there are not enough brands to consume. So, what will it take for these brands to come up and how can they be built into iconic brands? The experimentation and the practical implementation took place over the last 10 years.
The business model has changed, the way you build the entire story with the consumer has changed, the channels and the media have changed. But the fundamental truth is you always start with the insight or understanding of where that opportunity lies. That's where digital-first becomes a very interesting opportunity to engage consumers. The most interesting thing is that there are thousands and thousands of these opportunities. What you didn't even believe was possible, say a few years ago, is now an interesting new exciting business that has already been launched and is successful.
We believe that if you have the right consumer insight, the right product, and if you are executing it as per plan, you can still build many, many hundreds, if not thousands of brands in this country. There is so much opportunity.
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The internal organisational dynamics in a large company make it very difficult to launch new products, new brands, new categories. Their sales system will have such a large basket to sell, that putting one little thing on top of that will be a very, very tough proposition. One of the things we have seen as a trend, is that most of these large multinationals, large Indian consumer companies are becoming more acquisitive once a company has reached a certain size. Marico, Unilever are some examples.
Digital is still a great way to build a global brand. So today, apart from Amazon, which is a juggernaut, there are more and more platforms where you can do the product-market fit testing of the consumer. The good news is that India is starting to get acknowledged as an important country or an important region where interesting brands can be adopted in a global context.
We have seen some very early and beautiful signs of things like ayurveda and yoga. We are seeing a lot of work happening in the area of home decor and handmade artisanal products, even on the commodity side, things like tea. There is a huge headroom and hopefully one day we will see brands from India all over the world and we will be proud of them.