With over a decade of experience in Ayurveda, the company has established a trust-led market presence, supported by personalised, multilingual engagement and strict quality standards. Its focused approach to men’s wellness and a profit-first, asset-light business model has positioned it strongly within a growing category.
Sheryll D’Souza: The fact that you’re in Ayurveda, it also means that you have to embark on that big huge trust factor when it comes to catering to your customers, right? So how are you doing that? What is it that your company is doing differently that makes you stand out, especially in the fact that this is a very competitive environment, everybody wants to get into Ayurveda, the top listed companies as well?
Aryaman Singh Chadha: Absolutely. So first of all, I’d like to answer that having 13 years in this field, we have a strong market presence, we have strong trust based user base already established. When we come out with a product, it means more, it already substantiates with more trust since a long history of accredited and trust based relationship has already been established.
Apart from this, the fact that we boast a multi-language model with hosting all the Indian languages, all the regional languages, which gives us that extra bridge that is connected between the user customer and our site where they feel personalised care is being developed through them. And the biggest advantage that we have is that we have solved a problem of India that the whole nation had ignored. We saw the gap in sexual wellness being present in men’s wellness, and we worked tirelessly towards finding the right solution to this problem.
Because I truly believe this is not just a sexual wellness category, this is crucial to determining how a life is led. Because once this core pillar of men’s wellness is broken, the customer will face problems way deeper. He will face internalised inferiority complex, he will have internal stress issues, his relationships will break down, performance anxiety.
So once we have tapped into this segment, given that we have crossed a revenue of 100 CR in just men’s wellness, that automatically means that we are not just here as competitors with everyone else, we are the leaders.
Sheryll D’Souza: So you would say that this is a segment where you are leader and that’s where it’s going to be a growth driver going ahead?
Aryaman Singh Chadha: Absolutely. After a lot of consumer behaviour data research, we have seen that this is going to be an ever-growing segment sector and we have positioned ourselves to become a mould that will further grow into this art category and provide and extend our portfolio regardless.
Sheryll D’Souza: So let’s talk about your business model then. If you look at your business model, it is asset light, you have outsourcing manufacturing, though you have actually focused on your brands, direct to consumer sales, your marketing as well. If you could tell us, which is the one capability that you decided that we are going to invest in this first and that will help our brand actually grow bigger?
Aryaman Singh Chadha: So I’d say the first major investment that we made, if I were to just point out one, was identifying three high demand pain problems in the market.
The three being diabetes, addiction and sexual wellness. With diabetes, that’s always been the nation’s lead. But being an early entrant into addiction and sexual wellness, growing into that model and just making sure those three high demand pain points are catered to, that made sure that our demand was met and that our economics was holding up.
And apart from this, I’d say that being first generation entrepreneurs, we have always been an ROI first business model where we bore into a positive ROI after just the first sale, instead of the usual route that a lot of brands seem to be adopting these days, where they’re not even making profit after the third, fourth, fifth sale, because they’re pouring so much money into just creating a brand and then opening that extrapolates into profits later down the line. We have strictly been a profit first organisation.
Sheryll D’Souza: All right. So are you, correct me if I’m wrong, you source your products from third parties?
Aryaman Singh Chadha: Yes.
Sheryll D’Souza: Okay. But you control branding, marketing as well as distribution?
Aryaman Singh Chadha: Yes.
Sheryll D’Souza: Okay. You are planning to scale up? Yes. That’s the ultimate goal, right? But what are the sort of an operational risk that you actually foresee?
Aryaman Singh Chadha: I’d say the biggest operational risk that comes with scaling up, considering that we have third party manufacturers, is there is a continuity issue and quality check issue that we could potentially face and further down the line, scaling up to ensure that the highest of quality is maintained, given that we’re sourcing it from third party, that becomes tougher to maintain.
But from my experience, Sat Kartar has always been very aggressive in tackling this. We ensure strict and stringent quality checks from our manufacturers. We have tests, audit batches, so that the trust isn’t ever broken, so that the top level product quality is ensured at all stages of the product building, manufacturing, through official formulations of Ayush.
We have ensured that the continuity problem will never arise. And apart from this, we have also, this year, opened up our first manufacturing unit, which will now take care of 50% of our capsule manufacturing. And it is by intention that we haven’t gone over the 50% mark for our in-house manufacturing, because we believe that putting all our seeds into one basket could lead to just increases chances of maybe a further problem coming up later down the line, where if we see a problem in our own manufacturing unit, maybe that ruins months of profits.
So we have still kept and held our end-to-end agreements with our contract manufacturers. And most especially with our contract manufacturers, we make sure that they are exclusively manufacturing for our product until they take prior agreement from us to source for anyone else. And that is also only when we are not hitting minimum order quantities with them.
So that ensures our brand quality is maintained and it’s safely tied.
Sheryll D’Souza: All right. So you’re making sure that all this is in check.
And given the fact that you are scaling, you are actually diversifying in various segments. In fact, breaking records in certain segments or basically breaking stereotypes as well. But on that note, thank you so much, Aryaman, for being part of SmallCap Spotlight.
It’s all the very best to you and your company. Thank you so much for being part of it.