Almost all of the businesses they’ve acquired are weird, disruptive, and extremely forward looking in terms of capturing a younger, non traditional market.
Over time in London, supermarkets have gone from offering 1-2 vegan options in the whole store to entire sections of the stores offering healthy snack alternatives, plant based meat, and vegan alternatives to dairy. People are giving importance to environmental sustainability (in clothing too!), fitness and general wellbeing. Whether the same happens in India as products like these become cheaper and ubiquitous is yet to be seen, but it’s likelier to be accepted by the younger market.
While studying these startups, I was amazed by how good their social media presence is: they post the right kind of content frequently and engage with their customers. They’ve got pages on every platform, and a dedicated app for each startup. I’ve also noticed my friends have used these products and are now regular customers.
Take the Souled Store, they’ve got over 750,000 followers and over 1 million downloads on their android app.
mCaffeine already has 250,000 followers.
Mom Junction has over 400,000.
I’m not attaching images for all of them, but you would have noticed that they’re really good with arguably the hardest part of a new product: brand creation.
Overall,
| Brand | Followers |
|---|---|
| mCaffeine | 240,000 |
| Souled Store | 750,000 |
| Mom Junction | 417,000 |
| Style Craze | 607,000 |
| Nature’s Basket | 80,000 |
| Vedix | 282,000 |
| Dr. Vaidya’s | 40,000 |
| Spencer’s Retail | 13,000 |
| Skin Kraft | 320,000 |
| Total | 2,750,000 |
If they continue to play the social media game this well, it should be a great driver of traffic towards their products, and it’ll be worth revisiting these numbers 3 months from now to understand how their brands are being perceived. I was intrigued when I saw these names in the business structure, but it’s hard to gauge the scale of a startup from just a name on a page. Seeing that they’ve managed to get this large a following has made me sit up and pay attention.
I also noticed something while trying to understand what Bowlpedia does. Reading this thread, it looks like their waffle and toastee business is known, but they’ve silently ventured into frozen ready to eat biryani and waffles. I couldn’t find more information on google, but there’s a very brief mention of this on page 22 of the 2020 annual report. Take a look at the website.
From the instagram posts, they’re leveraging Nature’s Basket and Spencer’s Retail to sell the frozen foods. Given how unique they are in this space, and Jubilant Foodworks’ analysis on how biriyani was the most ordered food on Swiggy/Zomato, I think this venture is incredibly under-advertised especially considering how well they’ve advertised the other brands, and also considering the opportunity size. I would be shouting about this from the rooftops as much as they are with TooYumm.
I’ve also come across Sanjiv Goenka’s links to the Mamata Bannerjee administration, and this old article from 2016 is a nice read on his ability to navigate the politics of West Bengal. Given the outcome of the elections, there shouldn’t be any surprises to the story on that front, and if the relationship has benefitted the RPSG group, it will continue to do so.
Disclosure, invested in RPSG Ventures.