EVER WONDERED WHAT IT TAKES TO BUILD A BRAND? WELL SOME REAL INTEREST, LOADS OF PASSION, LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE AKA CO-FOUNDERS COMING TOGETHER, TIME FOR SOME PIVOT, SHAKE IT AND MIX IT WELL TILL YOU GET YOUR DESIRED BRAND IN RESULT. WELL THAT’S HOW THE STORY SUMS UP FOR WILD CRAFT. ENTREPRENEUR EXPLORES THE JOURNEY BEHIND THE BRAND.
Gaurav Dublish and Siddharth Sood, who studied management from the same institute (NMIMS, Mumbai), got their first jobs in Bangalore. Over a weekend, they chanced upon Dinesh, a mountaineer by profession, who took them on a fishing camp in Cauvery. The three of them got together to form an enterprise taking people out for expeditions. However, for the first seven years it was purely run as a hobby rather than a commercial entity. Dinesh, who is a mountaineer by profession, started this as a services company in 1998 out of a garage. Till 2007, none of them was full time involved in the business. Eventually, in those seven years all three of them moved out of Bangalore and had global careers. Dinesh was in the US with National Outdoor Leadership School, while Gaurav and Siddharth worked with Standard Chartered and GE respectively.
Sharing how the three moved it from a hobby to business, Siddharth Sood, Co-founder, Wild craft, says, “The three of us converged in Bangalore over a period of six months in 2007 and discussed how we can scale this up commercially. The most important call was this is going to be a product company. We see lot of scope in the outdoor product space in the country.” Soon, they quit their global jobs and took the entrepreneurship leap.
Prior to that products formed a minuscule portion of the company contributing to only 20-25% of the revenue. On the other hand, the services business faced an issue of scalability as getting certified people in India was not easy. They took a factory with 10 employees to start manufacturing. Dinesh who goes on a lot of treks, hikes, climbing mountains actually became the guinea pig practically testing all the products while Gaurav looked at marketing and sales and Siddharth focused on the operations side. Today Wild craft employs close to 1800 people in its three factories across Bangalore and Himachal Pradesh.
SUPPLY CHAIN
This story is from the July 2016 edition of Entrepreneur magazine.
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This story is from the July 2016 edition of Entrepreneur magazine.
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