Musings From Deepak @ DSG Consumer Partners #101

We Invested in KNYA: Building a Category-Defining Brand for Medical Professionals’ Apparel Needs

Last year, we decided to publish a public note titled "Why we invested in [co name]" each time we make a new investment. This holds us accountable to the founders we back, the investors in our funds and ourselves. By making this public, there is full transparency in what we do and why we do it.

Our latest note is Why We Invested in KNYA: Building a Category-Defining Brand for Medical Professionals’ Apparel Needs. The first time we met Vanshika and Abhijeet, we knew we wanted to partner with them to build a category-defining brand.

Listen to Deepak Bagla, CEO of Invest India, delivering his address on why the next decade is India's

Deepak Bagla, Managing Director & CEO of Invest India, delivered a keynote address at the Treasury Leadership Forum 2023 in Mumbai recently.  He spoke about India's future, the country's digitization change, and the most unprecedented transformation that we are facing in terms of both scale and pace. He also spoke about the story of start-ups in India which is about entrepreneurship, the new generation, and the ability to access unique opportunities.

HUL getting out of the commodity atta & salt business as it focused on more value-added categories, including dressings and sauces

Never too late. HUL has been acquiring insurgent brands and disposing of commodity brands, I assume with the view to increase their exposure to the premium categories where there is higher growth and profit margins.

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, L’Oreal, Unilever, Mondelez and others, said they witnessed strong growth in 2022 in India in their earnings reports and investor calls

With analysts forecasting that in only 7 years by 2030, India will represent 20 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of the qualified workforce, it is no surprise that global CPG companies are excited about India. This is better articulated in Deepak Bagla's speech referred to above.

L Krishnakumar, CFO of Tata Consumer speaks to The Economic Times about the company's ambitions

Wide-ranging Q&A spanning innovation, organic versus inorganic growth, the impact of online on the traditional offline channels and innovation. He touches on Tata's acquisition of Insurgent brand Soufull and how Tata is expanding the brand aggressively and taking it international. This reinforces our hypothesis that established brands will need to acquire insurgent brands as they build out their CPG platform and offerings. Sometimes, like in the case of Soulfull, they keep the founder, and in other cases, expect the acquirer to take full control with minimal input from the original founders.