Making DESi 'POP'ular

We DESIs love complex flavours; sweet, sour and spicy all at once. We love our hot masala breakfast, street-side chaat, thali meals. We have grown up with chaat, paan, chooran, mukhwas, chikki, dried amla, mithai and hundreds of varieties of food.

Like every culture, our unique tastes transcend product categories, these products have been adapted & perfected to our liking over the years. Some of these recipes go back generations.

However, most regional products which cater to our DESi cravings have been relegated to side shelves, bland packaging and glass jars in a paan/ chai shop. A lack of hygiene and standardisation leads to a lack of consumer trust, the main characteristic of a market dominated by unorganised players.

At GO DESi, our purpose is to make DESi 'POP’ular. We want to make DESi products relevant and accessible to Gen Z customers.

We do this by focusing on two vectors:

?Brand Experience:?Give consumers the standardisation and quality of an MNC brand and speak the language the Gen Z customer understands and expects from a new-age brand.

?Accessibility:?Make sure that the brand is available whenever there is a consumption occasion, whether on quick commerce or e-commerce platforms, high-street malls/modern trade, or in the next-door kirana or paan shop.?

?Why are we best suited to capitalise on this opportunity?

?Over the last 4 and a half years, we have developed/developing the following unique set of capabilities which enable us to deliver on our promise:

1.???Standardising a cottage industry product:?

Very early, we understood to give the desired consumer experience; it is important to own the backend. A fancy packaging label on a locally sourced product from a popular regional vendor won’t do.

This meant staying away from multiple product lines and focusing on DESi POPz.?

?We set up farmer sourcing, raw material standardization, traceability and self-owned manufacturing units. Today we manufacture 4 million POPz a month, enabling us to give a standard consumer experience across all channels and regions.

?Now, we apply the same learnings and processes to other categories we get into – DESi Meetha, DESi Bytes and DESi Mints.

?2.???Wide and diverse selling distribution network??

The operative words here are ‘wide and diverse’. Appeal for our products cut across SEC (socio-economic class), regions, which meant that our medium to reach customers also had to be diverse.

We started with offline distribution in stand-alone supermarkets. Then, as we built the network, we listed our products on Amazon and started selling through www.godesi.in?

?The pandemic hit, our online sales took off, and we doubled down on it till the CPMs and CPCs skyrocketed. On the back of good cash flows, we had started building our distribution network, which now stands at 10k stores.

?As of last month, Quick commerce is leading our sales growth and at the same time, we are seeding Kiosk as the next potential sales channel.?

?DESi POPz is the lead product which gets us entry into the sales channel. Newer categories subsequently will allow us to create depth.

3.???Rapid product extensions?

?Since we focus on select product categories, we build product variants to solve for rapid scale.?

?For example, DESi POP Tangy Imli is the original product we standardized and on the same product format we built Kaccha Aam, Real Aam, Khatta Nimboo, and POPz with Bitz. Today 60% of sales of DESi POPz is contributed from flavours other than Tangy Imli.

?4.???Brand Experience?

?The first challenge is to get the consumer to view us in the same basket as large MNC brands. She (consumer) should think of DESi POPz as an alternative not only when she is popping a digestive (mukhwas) but also when she is thinking about gifting a bar of chocolate.?

?The second challenge is that the product association of a DESi product is so strong that ‘DESi brands’ get codified and hence are fit to serve specific needs in the consumer’s mind. In my opinion, this is the reason why regional brands have not been able to straddle different product categories.

?There is a conscious effort to make GO DESi stand for a feeling/ emotion and distinct identity of Being DESi and thereby give it legs for future category expansions.

?We have and will continue to invest in building this capability.

?These capabilities form our flywheel.

To assist in keeping our flywheel rotating, we have recently raised in Series A fund-raise of INR 31 crores led by our existing investor Rukam Capital with participation from DSG Consumer partners & Roots Ventures.

?We will use the capital to double down on existing and build new capabilities to deliver our brand promise more effectively.

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To run this flywheel, one thing we need the most is a strong team, so if you resonate with what we are building at GO DESi, we are actively hiring for the following job positions.

• VP Sales
• Regional Manager Sales- MT
• HR Associate
• Area Manager-?Punjab & Haryana, Gujarat

?JD’s here: https://bit.ly/3Iz2PTO

?P.S. Pls DM or send a mail to [email protected] if you fit the JD