The Neon Show Aarti Gill on building a 180 Cr wellness brand OZiva, growing 5x in 1 year and onboarding Deepika Padukone as Brand Ambassador
With the emergence of health issues in recent years, most people have started becoming proactive to improve their immune system and diet, rather than being reactive at a later stage when the damage has already been done.
Even most doctors agree that if from an early age, we somehow get access to a preservative-free, natural source of nutrients, it might significantly boost our health in the long-run.
Our guest Aarti Gill’s OZiva is India's leading Clean, Plant Based Wellness brand.
OZiva was started back in 2016 and since then the company has scaled significantly with a large base of repeat customers.
During the episode, Aarti talks about how she pivoted from her first venture to OZiva, what are the major challenges she has encountered during her journey and much more.
Notes -
05:38 - Initial intro about OZiva
08:40 - High-level metrics around customers and revenue
09:44 - Building an Omni-channel brand v/s a D2C brand
11:26 - Early Education & Career prior to OZiva
14:14 - Meeting her co-founder and their first venture
18:35 - Deciding the first 4 products
21:14 - Market demand of OZiva’s Prime membership
22:26 - Challenges during the early years of OZiva
24:38 - Building a 20 Cr+ revenue from 2016 to 2020
26:53 - Building online & offline distribution channels
28:03 - Nuances while building distribution channels
30:10 - Rapid scale of 5x within a year
31:37 - Ensuring repeat purchase by customers
36:46 - Funding interest while growing from 0 to 20 Cr+
38:45 - Mental model of self-evaluating during each funding rounds
40:10 - Deepika Padukone as a brand ambassador
42:44 - Framework behind brand positioning campaigns
44:37 - Things which didn’t work out & learnings
46:19 - Why build new categories apart from nutrition