Spring is here!

With the vision of being a brand-first investment firm, our go-to-market strategy was to set up a strong brand & marketing consulting team that would work with growth-stage startups in India. Our first step was to identify the brand / marketing needs of founders. We curated a small team that would work closely with founders to help them define their brand, design their brand identity and create high-impact, needle-moving content.
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2019 - several founders believed in us and gave us an opportunity to work with them on specific problem statements. We started with Cars24 to help them redesign their identity, worked with Wakefit to find a brand narrative, and collaborated with MuscleBlaze on creating their #NaamHainZiddi campaign. By the end of the year, we had partnered with over 20 brands!

We ended the year with a 27-member strong team across 2 cities, with expertise spanning strategy, brand design, UI/UX, social media, content, communications, and tech. And we celebrated that team with our first international offsite to Prague, Czechia.

While we geared up for another action-packed year, the world had other plans. While we saw the world impacted in so many grave ways by the COVID-19 pandemic, it was truly fascinating to see how brands reacted to this global incident. We witnessed several brands take a severe hit, and some even buckle. Yet others panicked and questioned their survival. But yet another cohort saw the so-called opportunity that the situation presented, and pivoted to embrace changing realities and behaviours.

Amidst the series of lockdowns, we stayed engaged with our partner brands. We doubled down on some categories such as health, nutrition, edtech and helped brands like Oziva, Deep Rooted etc.. find relevance in the environment.

During this time, we even released our first piece of work that was created entirely remotely – the Wakefit lockdown series. We saw multiple brands react to the pandemic context and create content (and some, products!) that addressed some of the issues born of the pandemic.

Sept 2020 also saw the launch of our maiden growth fund, with Verlinvest as our anchor investor. The INR ~150Cr fund is dedicated to investing in growth-stage consumer-facing brands, with our marketing expertise as a value-add to our capital. In Dec 2020, we announced our first investment in Purplle.com, a beauty & skincare e-commerce platform. We have since worked extensively with the founders & team as strategic partners, helping to define the brand proposition, develop the new brand identity, and plan for the evolution of the platform and its owned brands.

As the end of 2020 rolled around, we had weathered the storm and come out of it with a strong brand team, and a portfolio of partner brands that had survived the pandemic.

A year of much activity for the Spring growth fund, as we announced 3 investments in various sectors.

The next addition to our growth portfolio was Juicy Chemistry, an organic skin & hair care brand designed to address a variety of concerns. Their soil-to-shelf ethos translated into a highly effective collection of products that have built a loyal customer base. Since announcing the investment in July 2021, we have worked closely with founders Pritesh & Megha Asher to more sharply define their brand proposition, and have that manifest across their packaging and communication.

Later that year, we also invested in Bewakoof.com, an apparel & fashion brand that celebrates the quirk in us all. Alongside Prabhkiran and his team, we worked with the brand to bring its brand proposition alive across design & communication. As they extended their product portfolio to include personal care, we were deeply involved in the positioning of brands GoNuts and Cosmos – right from naming the brands, to developing the identities and communication for each.

We wrapped up 2021 with our investment in Mosaic Wellness, a company that develops solutions to prevalent health & wellness concerns through their brands BeBodywise and Man Matters. Since our investment, we have worked with the brand to create strong communication solutions for individual brands and develop robust frameworks that allow their teams to build the brand proposition and tenets into all consumer-facing elements.

We continued to strengthen our brand-building capabilities, developing brand design and campaign communications for partners including mCaffeine, Plix, Glen Appliances, Levi’s, GoColors and Bounce Infinity.

2021 marked our return to the office, embracing a hybrid model that offered us a balance of safety and camaraderie. We also had our second offsite, with our team of now 30+ members converging in the Maldives for some much-needed bonding and rejuvenation.

As the world began to return to a sense of normalcy, our foot was already on the pedal.

2022 saw us make two more investments from our growth fund, in dental startup Dezy (erstwhile Smiles.ai) and financial savings app Jar.

Our investment in Smiles.ai came at a pivotal moment for the brand, as they braced to scale their offline presence across the country. We worked closely with the founders to plan this strategically, right from the renaming exercise (Hello, Dezy!) to developing a distinct brand identity that manifested across the brand’s digital and clinic presence.

The Jar app was created to build healthy financial savings habits in people, allowing them to save small change from their online transactions to contribute towards big goals. We have since worked with Nischay, Misbah and their team to build greater awareness of the product through branded content, as well as streamline their communication efforts to reach a wider audience and create a more efficient funnel.

2022 was also a period of preparation for developments on the investment side. More on that in 2023!

Meanwhile, our consulting arm was creating a gamut of work across the spaces of brand design and communications. We partnered with brands like Urban Company, 82ºE and Zoya, amongst others, with objectives ranging from brand awareness to launches.

A mammoth year for our investment arm!

The year started with us seeing our first exit from a growth-stage fund brand, as Bewakoof was acquired by the Aditya Birla group in Jan 2023.May 2023 saw us launch our early-stage fund, Early Spring. An ~INR 300Cr fund anchored by Godrej Consumer Products Ltd, our second fund will focus on investing in early-stage D2C brands, with strategic brand & marketing advisory as a value-add to our capital.  We made our first early-stage investment in health & wellness platform Hyugalife in June 2023, with advisory involvement in their journey from platform to product portfolio.

In the month of July 2023, we announced two new investments from our growth fund. The first was fintech brand Niyo, who are ready to disrupt the space of travel finance in India. Since our investment in the brand (in fact, even prior to it!) we have worked with Vinay, Viren and team to build a stronger proposition for the brand and its offerings. We have since had an impact on the brand’s campaign communications and design identity, and are closely involved in charting out the evolution of its offerings in the near future.

The second was in study abroad consultancy Leverage Edu. While still early days, we’re already deeply entrenched in their system, working with Akshay, Aman and team to craft a strong brand narrative and presence as the business scales to newer markets and formats.

Our final growth investment of 2023 was in the silver jewellery brand Giva. As we embark on this partnership with Ishendra and team, we’re excited to help them build a distinct presence and portfolio in the category.