S3E05 – Clarity in Purpose is Clarity in Branding

How do you create a brand that’s not just visually stunning but also drives profitability while focusing on social impact? Join us on a journey with Siddharth Purohit, co-founder of Aazol, a direct-to-consumer food company. In this episode of Damn Good Marketing Podcast, we dive deep into the art of clarity and how it can free up valuable time, the importance of controlling costs, and the challenges of entering the retail space. Whether you’re a startup founder or simply curious about the intersection of design, business, and social impact, this episode offers valuable insights that will leave you inspired. Tune in now and discover the secrets behind Aazol’s success!

Discussion Topics: Clarity in Purpose is Clarity in Branding

• Jumping to the visual shooting process
• How did he become a professional diver?
• Siddharth’s past experiences before joining Aazol
• What inspired Siddharth to create Aazol’s designs?
• How to manage logistics as a small brand?
• Which customer feedback to address at which point of time?
• What does growth mean for Aazol?
• Which elements to prioritise as a founder?
• Clarity gives time
• Advice for someone starting from the visual standpoint and trying to succeed
• Future for Aazol

Transcript: Clarity in Purpose is Clarity in Branding

Subha Chandrasekaran Hasita, I’m such a sucker for nice puri bhaji. I can live on that three meals a day, every day of the year. But, I just saw this divine image of this piece of puri dunking itself in a bowl of amras. And I just can’t get it out of my head.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah, mango season is over. Why are you putting me through this?

Subha Chandrasekaran I just need to have it now. And luckily I can just add it to the cart and I can have it now.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah, because I know where you saw that image because I also saw that image. I ordered it also, by the way, it’s on the way. And I have ordered several other products from this really lovely brand called Aazol which is a direct to consumer food company, and we’ve had the opportunity to enjoy that visual language quite a bit. 

I’ve drooled quite a bit over their pancake syrup in the virtual world before drooling on it in real life. And it’s only right that we should bring one of the founders onto the Damn Good Marketing podcast and talk to them about Making some of those very clear, very crisp, beautiful, frankly, drool worthy visual decisions so early in the life of a brand, right?

 To the good-damn marketing podcast today we have with us Rohit co-founder. At the website is Aazol guys, first we order a product, listen to the podcast, and he’s talking to us today about visual design and making decisions around that, which is really big for a company that operates in a space where the job is to tempt people to try something. We hope you take away a lot more from this episode as well, as we have done and are happy listening.

Jumping to the visual shooting process

Hasita Krishna: How complicated is the shoot process usually for a product like this?

Siddharth Purohit: I wouldn’t say it’s particularly complicated. We have our partners, Lost & Hungry Studios, we have been working with now for two and a half years

They shoot our products for us. And they started around the time Aazol did, And both of us have been growing together as well. Having strategic partners like them who have been part of the whole journey means that at this stage shoots are relatively uncomplicated affairs because they understand you and them.

So as long as you come in with a fairly clear brief. Things happen nicely and efficiently.

Hasita Krishna: That’s interesting. I just realised about a minute before we started that you are a professional diver.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Tell her more because that’s when I come to find her, she’s probably deep underwater.

Hasita Krishna: So how long have you been diving for?

How did he become a professional diver?

Siddharth Purohit: I dived enthusiastically for the first time ever, exactly a decade ago, and got very much bitten by the diving bug. Then over the next few years dive, many locations across the world. Indonesia, Maldives, Oman, Japan Lakshadweep many times, the Andamans. 

And right before I went for my master’s program, I decided to do my professional certification and become a divemaster. So I went to stay for a little over a month in Okinawa, the southernmost Japanese, and there I did my professional certification. So I became a divemaster.

The last two, three years, I haven’t dived much. I think the activity as a whole is becoming a little too commercial for my liking. But I’ve still done about 200 ish dives.

Hasita Krishna: That’s interesting. You went all the way up to Divemaster. Yeah. So honestly, that’s a dream. I only got my open water in March. But yeah, there is like a very clear plan in terms of completing that master in the next one and a half year or so.

Siddharth Purohit: Very cool.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think because we complement each other in so many ways and we do two podcasts together and I don’t know how to swim. So she comes back from these dives and she’s, describing, the surreal experience that she’s had. And I’m like, okay I’ll go with it. 

Hasita Krishna: To her, it’s fiction, right? like a story. Yeah, no, we’re very nice. Very nice to meet a fellow diver. And thank you so much for agreeing to come on today.

Siddharth Purohit: My pleasure.

Hasita Krishna: So how the brand caught our attention is we saw a very interesting Instagram ad. It was a video ad for Amritsar. and What I really liked is the commitment to going the whole distance when it comes to visual communication, right?

Even your Instagram page actually is a very refreshing departure from, here’s my product here’s another product. Here’s a third product. Here’s the shop button. What’s the same? Yeah. You can maybe make brownies. You can maybe make something interesting with this on a Sunday.

So I really liked that kind of approach to bringing consumers in. And that’s why we really wanted to talk to you about what that journey was like, and how some of these decisions were made before you knew that they were good decisions, right? Thank you so Yeah, a little bit of maybe context so have you worked in FMCG or D2C before?

Siddharth’s past experiences before joining Aazol

Siddharth Purohit: I have worked only as a management consultant

Hasita Krishna: Okay.

Siddharth Purohit: before Aazol, professionally. It’s pretty much divided into three categories: conduct analysis on heavy sets of data in Excel, and make attractive presentations. Convince people of the relatively simple decisions that you have taken. That’s about it. That’s what I did in various capacities for six years. So the short answer is no. There is no D2C, no FMCG experience.

Hasita Krishna: That much more fascinating, right? Because seeing clearly what you’re doing is working as a consumer, purely looking at it, or even someone in the domain who’s seen a lot of brands not be able to achieve maybe the kind of acuity that you’ve managed to achieve with the brand.

And what I understand is that this department is entirely yours. The branding, the marketing, the digital communication. So can you walk us through maybe what were the first two or three decisions you made on that front, which you think are good decisions at this course.

Siddharth Purohit: If I may be allowed to add one more element to the text, I think anything and everything that I have done from designing Aazol’s brand language has come from being a discerning customer over the years. So I’m very house grown. I have stayed. Alone in our family’s old apartment for the last eight years now, since I was 22, all of the furnishings have been done by me. I have a specific taste in fashion as well. So stylistically, I’ve always greatly enjoyed aesthetics.

So to have those sensibilities as a consumer, I think has been very important in designing anything from a manufacturer, producer, marketeer lens.

Hasita Krishna: Oh, were there any brands? In India, preferably that you would look at and say, okay, this is something I want to do or this is something I don’t want to do. or was it you saying, okay, there are all of these brilliant examples and I’m adding on to that. What was that?

What inspired Siddharth to create Aazol’s designs?

Siddharth Purohit: I would say the answer is a bit of both, and I’ll detail it out as follows. I thought no one was doing this. For instance, to the idea of having brown paper packaging.

Very keen to communicate the earthy element, the rustic element of Aazol through it. So I had to avoid plastic packaging, even if it meant higher cost. I think it is around the pandemic, so I’m talking mid 2020. Okay. I think none of us really ventured more than maybe 200, 300 metres. away from homes. I stay in a very nice, jumpy area in Bombay, and we had the original Subco open very close by.

And it was started by a young gentleman, a friend of a friend. So my friend took me there to the store and I was really impressed with their visual language, as you called it. And what really spoke to me, was the incredible attention to detail. This was something that had been to every single spacing, every single line, sentence, word letter used, been very carefully detailed out by someone who had a clear idea as to how it was to look.

I also greatly enjoyed Subcode’s use of regional typography. And I was quite captured by that being a way for young people looking to start interesting things in the country that were rooted in our tradition. So young people are exploring our own heritage and bringing in interesting things. ways. So that’s one, Brandon did these couple of things to me, show me that attention to detail element, show me the regional typography and the nice ways it can be used and catered to the philosophy that I believe.

Hasita Krishna: Sure, of course. And speaking of support, I think now seeing as all in that context, it makes a lot more sense, right? Even the name that you’ve chosen is not probably a word that a lot of us outside of Maharashtra may be familiar with. But you’ve done a good job of explaining. And I also like that attention to detail, which percolates into the actual packaging itself even of liquid products, right? I have a bottle of your liquid jaggery, I’m addicted to it, but it’s a pretty solid bottle, right? And it’s not very common for liquid goods to travel very well.

As much as I love the ad and I love how things look, if the packaging is damaged or if the bottle is broken, then I’m going to be disappointed. So how do you manage all of these expectations?

How to manage logistics as a small brand?

Siddharth Purohit: So the whole company today is divided into two large sections responsible for sales and then an equally hefty, equally robust, equally talented operations team responsible logistics responsible for product quality and responsible for any and all self help group sourcing which is right now in this nascent stage itself from 17 different self help groups all across Maharashtra and Some really rural from getting them first of all trained to handle it hygienically to pack the products to send it the task.

We have a warehouse partner responsible for holding our products. safely, hygienically. We have a logistics partner responsible for getting it across to consumers. There is no doubt that this whole journey is a learning journey.

For instance, you might have a lovely robust plastic bottle, but we initially started with glass. Glass, a fair few bottles broke along the way.

There are two elements here. One is does it get across to Hasitha in Bangalore safely? The answer is 80 percent of the time, yes. 20 percent of the time, we can only hold our hand up in apology and say, Hasitha, sorry, forgive us. Sometimes the Indian logistics system is cruel. It really is.

The second element is, of course, the cost and not just the cost, the extra weight as a part of it, the cost of all of the protective elements, just drop this plastic bottle in a larger box, send it to you. The glass bottle had to come in its own box and that box, larger box, and then went to you.

Significantly increasing our costs. The only thing you can do is along the journey, identify pain points as quickly as possible and work towards rectifying them.

Hasita Krishna: Which actually brings me to a lot of food brand founders especially of food brands that are five years and younger, perhaps have come out and spoken about being very closely in touch with the consumer. a disappointed consumer will probably go leave a review somewhere rather than even today, right? Despite me knowing that I’ll receive a message from the brand on WhatsApp, or I might get a call, the likelihood that I’ll express my disappointment in very public ways is still very high.

Siddharth Purohit: Absolutely.

Hasita Krishna: How do you decide what feedback to address at which point in time?

Which customer feedback to address at which point of time?

Siddharth Purohit: I believe the only thing you can really do is every single communication channel that we as people are used to in our daily lives. You keep open. From a brand perspective, can you write to me on email? Yes. Can you write to me on Instagram? Yes. Can you write to me on WhatsApp? Yes. Can you call me? Yes.

So first is to open all channels to the consumer. Second, trust that you can reach us. Should you have any query, any concern, any hassle whatsoever, reach out. Reach out on WhatsApp, reach out on email, call us, reach out on Instagram. Many people do. Many people also pass judgement only through reviews.

We live and die by reviews. We have to make a significant effort in garnering reviews. One person who’s, I would say, 50 to 50 percent of their job at Huzzle is just to focus on calling up customers saying, Please get us reviews. Please, did you like the product? Please give us a review.

Good, bad, ugly, just give us a review. So in that process, every single customer gets called There are still people who… behave extremely vitriolically with the brand. You can do nothing but develop a thick skin, because some of these comments, despite you being so clear that you are open, so responsive when any query does come in, are frankly unkind and hurtful. These You can only ignore.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah. For what it’s worth, the products are amazing. I’m a very picky eater and I’ve tried several products and they’re all. Truly, genuinely very nice and they feel very homegrown, right?

But also I sometimes wonder the niche that you’ve chosen is just that, right? It’s a very niche segment. You’ve named yourself Aazol, which is again a reference to a very specific part of the country. What does growth look like for you? Does it mean more people buying? Does it mean retention?

What does growth mean for Aazol?

Siddharth Purohit: I think here for every brand and every person, it’s about defining what success is to them. Mother and I both started as old because we wanted to start a social impact organisation right? For us, Aazol is not about chasing valuation.

For us, Aazol is not about becoming a unicorn. We would like Aazol to sustain itself on internal investment, what we have put in our family money. Therefore profitability is extremely important.

From, I would say day minus 60 or minus 124 months before launch, we were extremely clear. That cost control has to be an extremely tight burn to launch, right? The capital that we had spent in order to launch was the same amount as a friend of mine who also started a food company that has just closed down, spent only on his branding project.

And that means a lot of things on your own and be extremely judicious in both the people you can work with from a partner lens. And from whom you can hire,  right? So tight cost control because we have to achieve profitability. Profitability also can only be achieved if we hit a certain scale in terms of sales growth. But I can’t increase my marketing costs any more than this level.

Here just under, under my marketing budget. I need to bring in 2x the amount of sales that I’m currently doing. So that’s the goal.

We are paying our self help groups a fair, unnegotiated price. And Aazol is set up for the long term, regardless of. Mine and mother’s presence, as long as someone sensible is handling, And if this is achieved. That is success, plain and simple. And that goes from there. Do we start incorporating more self help groups?

Do we further help our current self help groups to grow? We will figure that out. Again, the goal there, Harsita, would be, I don’t want to help one lady in Alibaug. or become queen of that area.

It is about how do you ensure that money is going to that area for community upliftment. Otherwise, it’s not a social impact project. It’s about nurturing the business because it’s not yet self-sustaining. This becomes self sustaining all of our attention or a large chunk of our attention is directed towards the money going to what we targeted doing in the first place.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Yeah, what’s really interesting and would love to know more is there are so many important areas that you have been able to focus on equally, right? The visual language, the quality of the product and the social impact. And on top of all of that, staying profitable or being a profitable enterprise. If you had to choose two out of these four, because how would you go about that?

Because I do see some people who have a great product, but they’re just selling on WhatsApp. They’ve not built that website. They’ve not done that branding. In this case, you also have to create that customer education piece, right? This is the story behind us. So would you choose or what would be your two bits to someone who’s saying I have so many things I need to look at?

How do I do this?

Which elements to prioritise as a founder?

Siddharth Purohit: I can’t say much more than having a capable co-founder. for everything that you said, the only thing that was flashing through my mind was, Oh, here there was push and pull between mother and me.

And we always managed to, in that push and pull, arrive at the right decision for Azur. There were several things on the brand front which she was against. A lot of the lovely images that you see on our Instagram of the self help groups that I got shot through at a huge subsidy through an incredibly talented friend of mine who is Bangalore based photographer, a guy called Sameer Mohan, who runs Yoke Studios with his wife.

But even with a high subsidy, the cost was scary for us at that stage. So mother against spending such money, lots of discussions followed, let’s not go to all self help groups, only five. Let’s force Sameer to shoot both photographs and videos. One is push and pull with a good co-founder who compliments you well. I think the second thing, Subha, the second answer to your question is, you don’t have to necessarily choose only one or two out of those four things, as long as you are extremely strict and disciplined with yourself in the art of controlling costs. I can’t tell you how many good people we have.

Said, you are so right for this position. You are so right for us, or we would love to work with you. Lost & Hungry, for instance, I’m sitting in their office. Back when we started together, there were others, we had reached out to a whole set of photographers. While of course talented, a huge part of Lost and Hungary’s appeal at that point of time was that their costs were amongst the lowest.

So to with our designer Norma, who made the entire household brand language. As long as you are uncompromising about controlling costs, you can have brand good packaging. a good set of people, all of those necessary three, four pillars that you spoke about.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Sure. The discussions, or your With your co-founder and the way, it’s a huge time investment, right?

Vetting so many photographers, interviewing so many people, having so many conversations. It’s worth it because finally it’s serving a very important purpose for you.

Clarity gives time

Siddharth Purohit: Absolutely. And the sort of the interesting thing that you just said is having the time, which I think so many people will claim not to have, I believe I have a lot of time. I think clarity gives time. For instance, When we started Aazol, it wasn’t clear that we were never going to seek external funding.

It was not clear that options were open. When we made that decision, and now we’re wedded to the idea, internally funded, profitable, not seeking external funding it frees up so much of mothers and my time, because Investor presentations, don’t have to think about oh, or long, or returning customers rate topline. Growth ka he. So then you’re trying to orient your journey in the direction of those.

I’ve heard from at least two, three people that 50 percent of the founder’s time is spent around investment activities. So that automatically means that 50 percent of my mother and my time is now cleared up. I can think of a brand, I can think of an app, I can think of bettering operations and making sure that 4 percent return rate comes down to 2 percent return rate, all of the things that will help us achieve that goal of profitability.

Hasita Krishna: So it’s quite interesting because I think a lot of marketing problems that we try to solve or any functional challenges for that matter by then, usually we have tried something and that’s when we know that, it’s not working and therefore we’re probably trying to fix that. But really, I think what we are learning from this conversation is that you really need to spend a little bit of time on that level zero and know exactly what you’re doing.

Disagree about things. Hopefully begin to start agreeing about a few things and then start taking some decisions from there and then all the tactics evolve, which is very interesting

Siddharth Purohit: So you know how you said one question I get asked in my consulting engagements is when is a Good thing to invest in visual assets.

Hasita Krishna: Say, for example, the co-founder or the founder in question is not a very visually acute person. Visual language obviously has a far greater impact than any number of words ever could. And that’s just, that’s the harsh truth. What would be your recommendation to someone who’s really starting from that standpoint and trying to still succeed, right?

Advice for someone starting from the visual standpoint and trying to succeed

Siddharth Purohit: So if I understand your question correctly my answer would be that there is really no working around the fact that you need that expertise. If you don’t own it yourself, and you do not have a co-founder who possesses it, or if you don’t have a co-founder at all, then the only option as far as I see it is, Getting on a trusted strategic partner who can fulfil that space. That gap for you in a meaningful manner and in an invested manner?

I think every single strategic partner that I see of us, Norma Aya, and Lost & Hungry. I see a certain amount of investment in the whole brand on their side. They have committed a part of their heart and soul, if I may. To this journey and to the Aazol brand we, in the beginning gave them extremely clear, tight briefs. That was the requirement on our end. It is a requirement. I think many people give loose briefs, so they are very open to interpretation. Then it’s an iterative process. they’ll come back with their vision.

And post that iterative process, to an extent also letting go and trusting the vision of your strategic partner.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah. That’s interesting. And somehow it makes sense, right? Because I think what we see is the stick figures and we see a little bit of the, stick figures is actually the wrong word. It’s a very beautiful system using lines and shapes, which are basic. And I could ask you, Hey, why that?

Why not like a render? But it’s really not bad at all. It’s more about finding what appeals to any number of different things which could eventually have achieved the same purpose.

Siddharth Purohit: What you spoke of is called line art. I also wasn’t aware of what line art was until. Norma shared this with us and it spoke to us and she was, you actually, in an example, beautifully articulated my point, which is she gave something that we had no idea and would have never conceptualised on our own because we don’t have experience or expertise.

I have a little bit of aesthetic ability. Not much beyond that. It spoke to us, but it spoke to us and Norma was able to create it because we had shared an extremely clear brief.

I knew exactly, I didn’t know how it would manifest, but I knew what the Spins of the brand were when I reached out to Norma, whoever else I did at that stage. From a design perspective.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah. And that synergy or the lack thereof is something that constantly plays out in our lives in different contexts, right? And when the synergy is there it obviously makes a huge amount of difference to both parties working. Yeah, this is actually, usually because the guest conversations always end up being so much more than we ever prepare for.

I don’t mean in terms of time, in terms of how much we are learning from this as well. Like it’s been such a, I think a soothing conversation almost, and reinforces a lot of things that we’ve suspected about the respective businesses we run. Especially Siddharth, I think your messaging on clarity brings time.

I think We’re gonna be thinking about that for a very long time because I think it’s so true more than anything. And we kind just want to ask you one last thing about future plans for a brand like Aazol, or do you see yourselves going on shelf?

Future for Aazol

Siddharth Purohit: Absolutely. We have already over the last few months been making a concerted push towards retail.

And I was telling Vinayak, the founder of Lost and Hungry, just today, who asked me, Oh, how’s Aazol going? And I said, if the expected base, or if the maximum base on detail is 100, After building in buffers, we said, okay, expected base will be 30. Actual base is three.

This is the actual base after you have finally, after months figured out. In the beginning, when you come, you say, I want to be in general trade and modern trade and this and that and the other what we are, and this is just from a retail perspective, I answer what we are coalescing around. What we are finally coalescing around,

We belong to specialty stores, right? A finite range of speciality stores, which will give us access to premium customers. This includes the likes of, in Bombay, Nature’s Basket, the signature Reliance stores, Fashion Pick, for instance. These all are classified under modern trade.

And we’ve tried a lot, trust me, a lot of dead ends here. A lot of stores that we have entered, but then given no dividends, we’re selling three products a month. For instance, it’s just a complete waste of time. There are also a lot of these, in fact, at least niche super speciality stores would say that we are, we are

the farmers markets, stores, Ayurveda, et cetera, et cetera. Consider them to have super speciality, very snooty about the products that they will put in. I think most premium customers are discerning, not snooty.

Few snooty people will go there, but not enough to sustain either them or us.

These stores, you have to avoid, the general trade where you won’t get premium customers, you need to avoid,

Hasita Krishna: I was just gonna ask you how is it that clarity is so strong, but I get where you’re coming from.

Siddharth Purohit: I think it’s really simple. You have to try. You have to try intelligently, by the way, retail, there are a lot of upfront costs. And if you said yes to every single opportunity. That came, we would have spent tens of lakhs on those upfront costs itself, and we would have sunk by now. You have to be judicious in your decision making, but you have to try, and you have to evaluate quickly, and lessons learned have to be implemented fast.

So now in the last, I would say maybe as little as two weeks, but I’m being gracious and saying last month, which is the third big team that we are building at Aazol along with brand marketing, online sales, which I handle and operations, which mother handles retail, the team that we are building has finally reached that stage of clarity.

Where they aren’t headlessly chasing multiple opportunities and doing nothing correctly. They are in a focused manner, realising the potential of 20 stores only in Bombay. Bangalore nahi jaana, abhi Delhi nahi jaana, Pune bhi nahi jaana. Bombay mein 20 stores hai. Figure out what to do from a visibility perspective.

Get your processes right. For example, are they giving you purchase orders? How simple is that? Paying you on time. Just get the processes right, get visibility and make these 20 stores a success. And

Hasita Krishna: then you have a template for. Yeah. Yeah.

Siddharth Purohit: and that clarity builds time because now with that clarity, they have the time to do things correctly in these 20 stores.

And once you start doing things correctly, no doubt you will get the results.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah, absolutely. This is amazing. Yeah. I think, a B2C kind of brand and exploring the early days of it. But I think a lot of what you’ve discussed today actually applies. to any startup in, especially in the early days. So thank you so much. We hope you had a good time recording.

Siddharth Purohit: It was so lovely meeting both of you.

Our Guest: Siddharth Purohit

Siddharth is a bonafide Type-A, Siddharth helms Aazol’s sales, marketing and digital operations. A management consultant with Kearney in a former life, he is also a professional diver, keen trekker and adventure sports enthusiast. Siddharth’s peripatetic life (he has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and travelled to over 40 countries) has found root back in the land of his birth where he takes great joy in showcasing Maharashtra to the world through the foods of Aazol.