Zero To One of The Sleepy Owl Journey

Today Sleepy Owl completes 4 years. Our first online order from the Sleepy Owl website was placed on 14th June 2016.

What started out as a desire for the three young recently graduated millenials to start a little venture has now blossomed into a homegrown company whose products are becoming a permanent part of shopping baskets, online carts and kitchen shelves across Indian households. 

We had no idea what was to come or how far the company would grow. Neither of us had any F&B experience or FMCG experience when we conceived the idea to enter the coffee business. Like most good ideas it was a personal problem that we had as well as noticed around us and wanted to solve. 

This is the story of how we got our first order.

August '15

In August 2015, Ashwajeet was ready to move on from his existing job and called me saying he wanted to explore the option of starting a venture. I was working in Mumbai at the time and wasn’t sure if we had an idea that would materialise into something tangible. We struck a deal where I asked him to come to Mumbai and live with me while we brainstormed. If we came up with something, I would then quit my job.

Since we were both working out regularly and trying to eat clean, one of the first ideas was to start a meal prep company. We then thought of starting a company that made healthy sauces/dips (we have a name and logo for this), followed by a company to sell protein ice creams. For a variety of reasons, none of these ideas worked out (I’ll go into detail in another post).

September '16

We spent hours every day at the local Starbucks in Andheri West sipping Iced Americano’s, a drink that I was still adapting to. At home we would brew coffee using a French Press, which I found quite cumbersome. It was around this time that Ajai & Ashwajeet discussed the opportunity for Ajai to return from the US and be a part of our little project. They started discussing the coffee market at length. 

November '16

One day I returned from work and Ashwajeet introduced me to the concept of cold brew coffee. We learnt that it was slowly becoming popular around the world.

It would be worth noting that I grew up having instant coffee with loads of milk and sugar. We experimented with a few batches of homemade cold brew and were sold on the taste, benefits, as well as the potential for cold brew to be made popular in India. 

Note: Cold Brew Coffee is coffee brewed overnight in cold water and then filtered. 

December '16

We started researching the coffee market in India from the supply side and realised that India grows some of the finest Arabica coffee, most of which is exported leaving very little for Indian consumers. We started cold calling farmers, traders, and anyone who would talk to us to get insights about the supply side, since we felt strongly that to start a coffee company we would need some of the best quality coffee available. 

January '16

We also studied competition that we might face if we went ahead with our venture. We realised the gap in the market was 'to make brewing fresh coffee easy and convenient’. Startups were selling freshly roasted beans, freshly ground coffee and all kinds of coffee brewing equipment. We were looking at this from the perspective of a 23-25 year old (recent students, fresh into the workforce) and felt that there had to be a more convenient way to drink coffee that wasn’t instant and did not require lots of fancy brewing equipment.

The answer to that was the cold brew coffee.

We realised that coffee did not need to be intimidating. We believed that the artisanal coffee market was elitist. It made things complicated and unapproachable working hard to increase the perceived value of a cup of coffee. On the other hand the instant coffee market told you that anything other than instant granulated powder took too long and therefore was not worth the effort. We took the middle path. We wanted to get customers rich, delicious, freshly brewed coffee in an instant. 

February '16

We made our first trip down to Chikmagalur and interacted with farmers, traders, roasters. We asked a lot of questions to understand coffee as an agricultural commodity, the supply side of the business as well as how it would work if we were to purchase regularly. We went ahead and placed an order for 5 kgs of coffee beans all roasted and ground slightly different from each other and began experimenting to make the perfect cold brew beverage that we would eventually sell. 

We developed a formula that we still work with today through regular tasting, experimentation, writing to founders across the world and continuously tweaking and re-tweaking our processes.

March '16

We did our first consumer trial/launch at the Jindal Global Law School Sports Fest in March 2016 and got real feedback from paying consumers, which was a great learning experience. This was the first of many events, college fests, bazaar’s that we would do for the next couple of years to generate trials and visibility for our brand and products. 

April '16

We did not set out to be a D2C brand. Initially, we thought it would be smart to sell to cafes and restaurants and have them add us to their coffee menu. Our hypothesis was incorrect. Among all the beverages on the menu we did not stand out and our first association tanked. Armed with this insight we realised that going D2C via our website would be the quickest way to get in to the customer's home.

May '16

We spent a few days actively searching for packaging options that would be easy to execute at the launch phase where space (living room at home), capital (friends and family round), and infrastructure (none) were all very limited. We came across the BIB (Bag In Box) packing which was commonly used for wine in the United States and felt this would be an innovative way to package our cold brew. 

There wasn’t a single beverage brand in India using such packaging and there were no suppliers selling the necessary parts either. We had to resort to importing our packaging from China. While the samples and the packaging arrived we used the time to build our website, design the final packaging, plan our production and logistics, and order our first big batch of 100% Arabica Coffee from Chikmagalur. We then planned our launch strategy. (Spam everyone you know!)

June '16

On 14th June 2016, we went live and sold our very first 1.5 Litre Box of Cold Brew Coffee to a customer in New Delhi.

For the first 4-6 months we worked entirely out of Ashwajeet's parent's flat in Dwarka, New Delhi. This was home to production, packing, photography, dispatches and everything else!