When I started consulting founders, my thinking as a young businesswoman was a little selfish. How do i charge more? How do i get rich. How do I buy whatever I want. How do I gain the freedom to make my own decisions.

That notion held on till I spent the last five years opening restaurants and working closely with people who had no formal training in hospitality. Today, we work with around 600 of them.

Their stories sent me down a new rabbit hole altogether: Can I create more choices for the next generation of our employees? How do we build a world where they enter the hospitality workforce because they genuinely want to, not for the lack of options available to them?

My hunt for the answers has been on ever since.

I started by upping my own game in the business, alongside building training programs and growth paths for those teams, and in the process, I came to realise that my efforts as a singular, small business owner could also chart a different trajectory for the next generation, and offer more for the growth of the country.

Imagine what we could all do together!!

I started closely watching what a few founders were doing at a scale, and in doing so, upgrading lives of everyone in their teams.

Chefs Vikas Khanna and Prateek Sadhu are rewriting the story of Indian food, from roadside and heavy, to ingredient-led and innovative. Something as simple as breaking stereotypes about Indian food being limited to curry, spicy food but sill keeping the Indian ingredients as the hero of the kitchen.

My inspiration, Asma Khan, who is not just giving a new life to regional Indian cuisine for the world, but also a first mover in bringing in the culture of equality, fearlessly fighting the big boy clubs in the world of hospitality. What a way to represent and lead.

Sabyasachi, more famous than most Indian celebrities in the couture world, built India’s first global luxury house, and now the world reads Indian craft differently because of one man. If you listen to his interviews, it was very much a part of his big vision - He wanted India to be known for craftsmanship.

Creative entrepreneurship is doing wonders to change the perception of India for the world. Makes me wonder, how much of the job and responsibility belongs to us, the business owners.

We were taught that country branding is a government function. Flags, campaigns, Incredible India, a ministry with a budget and a film. I always treated it as someone else’s line item.

The national brand is an input to your unit economics, and right now a big part of it is written by creative entrepreneurs going many steps beyond the product, to rewrite India’s story.

We assume the world’s idea of India is fixed, and low. It is neither.

We make close to a fifth of the world’s generic medicine and the majority of its vaccines, and more than a hundred and fifty countries rely on us to do it.

Software, space, engineering, the same story.

But India still gets read as affordable rather than aspirational.

It is the categories people can see and show off, fashion, food, spirits, design, the object on the shelf. We are living for the Instagram world, and the optics have never mattered more. It is a perception, and a perception belongs to whoever tells the better story. (Time to take some notes from Korea)

A wave of founders is rewriting that perception right now, category by category, and getting paid a premium for it. The opportunity is to do it at the scale that changes a country.

The clearest version of this is Japan.

In 1945 Japan was defeated, occupied, firebombed. “Made in Japan” meant cheap and shoddy, the knock-off of its day. Within four decades it meant the highest quality on earth, and Japanese culture, from Sony to Nintendo to sushi to minimalist design, had become one of the most admired brands in the world. Today Japan sits at or near the top of every nation-brand index - Its products, its craft and its culture do the talking.

Japan did not pass a law that said make good things. What Japan built was a shared discipline of quality (a sign of a nation with something to prove). It borrowed statistical methods from an American, W. Edwards Deming, whom his own country had ignored, and turned them into kaizen and total quality management, absorbed into every firm until quality stopped being a policy and became a habit of the hands.

The state set the table. The companies carried the meal.

Look at how many countries ran the same play, and notice what they actually built.

Germany started from an insult. “Made in Germany” began in 1887 as a British warning label, forced onto German imports so shoppers could avoid the cheap stuff. It became the most valuable three words in manufacturing through a shared floor, the dual apprenticeship system and common standards that every small firm plugged into. A twenty-person workshop in Swabia inherited a premium it never paid to build, and held the line on quality because to cut a corner was to spend down an asset the whole country shared.

Switzerland made the floor a law. A watch cannot say “Swiss Made” unless at least 60 percent of its manufacturing value is Swiss, cased and inspected in the country. That single legal line, enforced by the state, is why a small Swiss brand you have never heard of can charge more than a bigger foreign one. The country becomes a label?!

France protects the story by geography. Champagne can only come from Champagne. It means a grower on the right side of a line sells sparkling wine at a multiple of an identical bottle made anywhere else. The country turned a place name into a moat that works best for all local producers.

The positioning of french cuisine can be a separate article altogether, which enabled chefs from all over the world to come and learn how to learn the art of cuisine and fine dining from the french.

Colombia branded a raw commodity. In 1959 the coffee growers’ federation invented a fictional farmer, Juan Valdez, and used him to tell the world that Colombian coffee was not a sack of beans but a premium worth paying up for. Farmers, collectively, own the brand that lifts all of them.

Now let’s just come back to India and take a deep breath. We have soft power most of these countries would envy, film, food, textiles, music, yoga, a thirty-million-strong diaspora. And we already own the exact instrument Switzerland and France use. India’s Geographical Indication tags. Darjeeling tea was the first, in 2004. Then Banarasi, Kanjeevaram, Pashmina, Basmati, Chanderi, and hundreds more. Each one is a legal, protected, place-based premium sitting on a shelf, mostly unmarketed.

We need entrepreneurs to be interested in telling the story of India through the products they built.

The prize is bigger than we treat it

The appetite for real India is already running ahead of what we supply.

Darjeeling is the most famous tea name in the world, our first GI, protected by law since 2004. The gardens make around ten thousand tonnes a year. The world sells close to four times that much under the Darjeeling name. Read that the right way round. Demand for authentic Darjeeling is so far ahead of supply that the market fills the gap with imitations.

Now multiply that by more than 650 GI tags, almost all of them unmarketed. Banarasi, Kanjeevaram, Pashmina, Chanderi, each a legal, place-based premium the rest of the world would have built a luxury house around. The raw material has never been the problem. The gap is that too few founders are able to see this premium themselves.

Whose job is it to change it.

In 1998 President Kim Dae-jung declared culture a strategic industry and funded it, and the return on that bet is BTS, Squid Game, and a K-beauty aisle in every country. It reads like a government victory. The state seeded. But the brand was actually carried by the studios, by a generation of creators, never by the ministry.

Even in the most state-driven case on record, the state set the table and the companies carried the meal.

India will not be branded from the top down. Our state is too big and too diffuse for that. The good news is that the people closest to the customer, moving fastest, are founders, and they are already winning. We are short of volume.

We need more Indian entrepreneurs to find that creative bone, and to at least try to charge a premium for the quality, the design, the story, for something in what they build.

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The founders already doing it are not doing the same thing

They are running different plays against the same old perception, and each one is worth studying, because you can pick yours.

Mira Kulkarni started Forest Essentials in 2000 with a small hand-filling operation and a bet that Ayurveda did not belong in the bargain wellness aisle. She priced it as prestige, packaged it as prestige, and refused to apologise for either. The world agreed. Estée Lauder took a minority stake, raised it, and is about to own the house outright, with Kulkarni and her son still running it.

A global major buys a premium it cannot build itself. Her play was to reframe heritage as luxury, and it opened doors for so many other players in the country to do the same. Can we imagine the number if all the Ayurveda brands in the country actually start telling their stories, on top of simply exporting it, what could happen?

The Jagdale family and Amrut ran the opposite play. An Indian single malt out of Bengaluru, put up against Scotch, and it won on Scotland’s terms, on serious lists and in blind tastings. Amrut Fusion has been rated among the best single malts in the world. When the copy beats the original in the original’s own class, the cheapness argument dies on the spot.

Gin is running the same play. Stranger and Sons and Hapusa medal at the competitions that judge the best of London and Spain, and they pour in some of the best bars in the world. The message underneath the bottle is simple. We can stand on the top shelf, and charge for it.

Sameer Seth and Yash Bhanage, with chef Girish Nayak, took the everyday and made it worth paying up for. Bombay Sweet Shop treats mithai the way a French maison treats a praline.

India needs a confectionery brand that stands next to the Toblerone you buy at a duty-free in Switzerland.

Nirupesh Joshi and Mercy Amalraj built Bangalore Watch Company to take the stereotype head on. For one limited series they cut the dials from the aluminium of a decommissioned Indian Air Force MiG-21. A watch that carries a piece of the country’s own aviation history on its face, and argues in metal that India means precision. We can bring craft to all categories.

Nand Kishore Chaudhary and Jaipur Rugs run the play I care about most. Tens of thousands of artisans, most of them women, most in villages that offered them no other ladder, making rugs the world buys at a premium. He did not choose between margin and dignity. He built a brand where the premium is the thing that funds the dignity, and makes it so damn cool every single time.

And they are not alone. Raw Mango made handloom modern, Nicobar made Indian design feel current, Sula put Nashik on a wine list, and more push into fashion, food, beauty and spirits every year. Put them side by side and the pattern is plain.

Reframe the category, or beat the origin, or premiumise the everyday, or claim precision over cheapness, or fund the dignity - All of them collectively tell the story of the India the world yet has to see.

They stopped competing on price and started competing on meaning.

And every one of them quietly edited the world’s idea of what India makes.

This is the job, and now is the time to take it

Indian founders should think of themselves as patriots, in the only sense that costs anything. Build a product good enough that the world has to revise its opinion of the country it came from. Run a business clean enough that the story survives scrutiny. Then tell that story loudly, because the perception you strengthen is the one you get to bill against, and the one every founder after you inherits.

We have levers Japan and Korea never had at this scale. Thirty million Indians abroad, homesick and quality-conscious, a first market that will pay up for Make Great in India before the rest of the world catches on.

Hundreds of GI tags already sitting as legal, place-based premiums, waiting for someone to market them. Soft power most nations would trade for. What we lack is the decision to treat the country’s brand as our job too.

Sun Tzu wrote it plainly in The Art of War. “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” The founders above won first. They built the product, held the standard, and decided what India meant in their category before they ever went to market.

That is the whole invitation. Win first. Build something good enough that ‘Great in India’ is simply true, run it clean enough that the truth holds, and narrate it to the world before anyone else defines your category for you.

Do that, and the premium does not just widen your margin. It opens doors for everyone building in that category. It brings India forward. It helps the future generations to want to build in India.

Great in India is a higher-margin game, and it happens to be the one that changes the arc of the country while it pays you. There has never been a better time to take the job.

I am bullish on India, and I am 100000% bullish on Indian entrepreneurs.

In my early 20s I was fearless. The world was my oyster. I just wanted to make money, my own money. I was always in the room where some new business idea was being argued out. I went to every startup meet-up. It was 2013, for god’s sake. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone was building something. I was building several things at once.

No one in my family had ever built a scalable, systems-first business. My father still thinks he is better off than Adani and Ambani because he has no debt. (It’s not a bad way of life tbh)

My parents wanted me to marry first, so I wouldn’t have to shut the business if I married into another city later. Tough choice. I didn’t have the patience for any of it. I dived in, promising people things I wasn’t good at yet, and learning how to do them on the go.

When I started my first business at 23, I made the stupidest mistakes possible. I still do. Back then they were much worse.

In my attempt to review the last 15 years, I made a list of some of my stupidity, which in hindsight has made me a sharp businesswoman today.

STUPID 1

If you’re starting your first business with your friends, be ready to lose that friend.

I worked with many friends early on. I let emotion win over logic every time. I expected people to share my vision and my rigour because we had known each other for years and had fun together.

Knowing someone a long time tells you nothing about how they work.

STUPID 2

Put your value system into the business. It buys you a good night’s sleep.

I started ventures where I only cared about the profit. It did not hold. You need to feel something for the problem you are solving, or for the people you are solving it for. Everything I do now, I do to create more employment in this country, by building successful founders and businesses.

STUPID 3

I stopped investing in myself the day I started my business.

I told myself there was no time. I just did more of everything and called it hustle. My biggest moat today is the opposite of that. Knowledge. I stay ahead by taking classes, reading, and paying for coaches who are sharper than me, and most important - learning to build teams.

STUPID 4

My interns and I would break each other’s heads every day.

Hiring a crowd of inexperienced people is more expensive than hiring a few smart senior ones. It took me a long time to learn to bear that cost.

STUPID 5

Infinite profit was my goal when I started, more is better. In survival mode, no opportunity should be lost, right? I picked up some really shady work, and ended up working with assholes too.

Work out the number that buys you the life you want, with your purpose met. Once you have it, your decisions change. You start making the fulfilling choice over the merely bigger one. The sacrifices get smaller.

STUPID 6

Name the fear of shame.

I spent years on what people would think of me. Nobody was thinking about me. They were busy with their own lives.

Once I understood that, the fear had nothing to hold on to. I got bolder. I found my real voice and stopped performing for someone else. The right people started showing up to work with me.

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I do not have the luxury of being a regular anywhere. Being a regular takes commitment. Whatever time I have that is not spent working, entertaining, or researching goes into lying in my oldest pajamas, in bed, wasting away, doom scrolling. I put that under research too.

I wonder, where is everyone getting the time to hang out at cafes? I understand Bombay. People need space, and sunshine. But is it not enough that we have a first place called home and a second place called office? Do we really need a third?

And do not quote Ray Oldenburg at me. I understand the third place. My question is how anyone is finding their true third place, because every place now is built for everyone. Meant for all. Which makes all of them a tad vanilla for the likes of me.

I have closely watched a hundred of these places open, fill up, and empty out. So I repeat this to every cafe founder I work with, or who tries to work with me. A cafe cannot build you a community. It can only host one that already exists.

Hold that thought. I am going to spend the rest of this trying to earn it.

The vibe is not the coffee

Let’s take a moment to think about this. It is not the coffee filling up these viral cafes. The people lining up for that cup are not connoisseurs. They would not know a natural process from a washed one and they do not care.

So what is it? What is this vibe? What is this famous egg tart? What is this feeling of belonging that pulls a queue onto a footpath? And why does it last a couple of months, maybe a couple of years, before the same loyalist moves on to the next opening without a second thought? Was it always like this?

Are any of these new age cafes loved across generations, or only across seasons? What, while we are here, is so bougie about Boojee? (I personally love it, but I don’t get it)

Coffee houses used to be dangerous, but at least they had a personality.

They were not always like what we see today. The coffee house used to carry the archetype of an outlaw.

Historically, coffee houses started to make a point. That was the brand. People chose one coffee house over another, depending on their own value system and way of life. In 1511, the governor of Mecca shut all the coffee houses down. He was frightened of them. Men were gathering, talking freely, and some of that talk was satire aimed at him. The ban did not hold. Other people in power were too addicted to the coffee themselves. But imagine that. Imagine a room so alive that a ruler bothers to shut it down.

Kings kept trying. In 1675, Charles II of England issued a proclamation to suppress coffee houses, calling them places where disaffected people spread scandal against the government. The outcry was so loud he backed down within days.

That was the coffee house. A parliament without power. A public living room for thinkers, creators, and the occasional soul just there to fix the inebriation from a morning of beer soup. Rulers tried to cancel it precisely because it was building a social infrastructure that could question them.

Now look at us. Two people are sitting in a cute little cafe over iced Americanos, discussing their horrible bosses and their worse exes, and neither of them could tell you why they chose that spot. Are they part of an invisible community that lives half on Instagram and half in the owner’s head? Is it just a cool location and everything else is incidental?

I have a test for this. I watched my own bar’s guest community carry us through covid, so I know a room can pass it. Will you choose that cafe when the coffee is not so good and the service is worse, because you believe in why it exists?

Oh. It exists to make profits only. Gotcha.

My husband ran a hole-in-the-wall bar in his early twenties. No head chef, no head bartender. He called it a “gastro pub”. It was packed seven days a week. Still is. When we asked guests why they liked to suffer like this, coming back night after night, the answer was unanimous - “As we have grown older, we miss hanging out at our friends’ homes. We want to be reminded of a easy, non-judgemental hangout, where we can just be, meet like-minded people our age “

The bar did not build that community. It gave one that was already forming a room to sit in.

When did coffee houses lose the plot?

Probably around the time hundreds of them opened with one intention. Scale. Just scale. Or worse, someone quit a good job to open a cafe for the good life.

So can communities be scaled? The answer is more useful than yes or no.

A cafe does not manufacture a community. It hosts one. When a brand tries to build belonging from scratch at every new outlet, it fails, because belonging does not open like a location. When a cafe is instead the physical room for a value system that was already gathering people somewhere else, it works. The community came first. The cafe is just where it finally sat down.

The whole point of a coffee house was to bring like-minded people together around a shared value system and stand up for something. Today most cafes are trying to sell some food and mostly average drinks. Amping up the product is a conversation for another day. But can we please stop calling our random guests a community?

The two kinds of cafes that actually work

Look closely at the ones that mean something and you will see they are not all the same animal. There are two kinds. Once you see the split, you cannot unsee it.

Some cafes scale a taste. A brand world. A point of view on design, on music, on how a room should feel. The community is people who want to belong to that taste.

Subko in India is not really selling coffee. It is selling the idea that India can make craft, coffee, chocolate, bread, that stands beside anything in the world, made here, from here. And it arrived at the moment Indians are proudest of being Indian. Subko just gave it a counter to stand at.

Cafe Kitsune is the cleanest proof of my point that I know. Before it was a cafe, Kitsune was a Paris house music label, run by people out of the Daft Punk orbit. Then a fashion label. Then, only then, a cafe. The cafe did not create the community. It is the fourth room of a crowd that already loved the records and the clothes. It hosted a taste that already had believers.

Monocle Cafe is a magazine’s readers given a room. Design people, travel people, quiet luxury people. They did not discover the tribe by walking in. They already read the thing.

This is also why every luxury house is suddenly opening a cafe. Louis Vuitton, Dior, Bottega. They already own a community. The cafe is just the cheapest way to let that community sit inside the brand for the price of a coffee instead of a handbag. It is engagement, not food service.

Meanwhile someone is buying Bottega in their pajamas at 1am in a tier two city, which tells you the community was always going to move online. The cafe is how a brand pulls it back into a room.

The other kind of cafe scales a mission. A cause that would exist with or without the coffee. And a belief, unlike a vibe, does not go out of season. This is why these last.

Cafe Joyeux in France is not a cafe that kindly hires people with disabilities. The mission is the company. It is built so that most of its staff are people with autism, Down syndrome, and cognitive disability, in real jobs, in prime high street locations on purpose, so the public sees them served with pride. You cannot value engineer that mission out, because the mission is the workforce.

Change Please was started by a City trader who walked out of finance. It trains people sleeping rough as baristas and hands them housing, a bank account, a way out. The coffee is the vehicle. The exit from homelessness is the point.

Coffee, Hip Hop and Mental Health was born from its founder’s own breakdown, in a Starbucks, unable to afford lunch. It is a mental health nonprofit for Black communities that uses hip hop as the language and free therapy as the offer, funded by the coffee shop. Notice the order. Therapy first. Coffee as the engine.

And then there is Ziferblat, which answers the question I asked from my bed. Where do people get the time? Ziferblat sells it. Everything in the room, the coffee, the tea, the food, the wifi, the piano, is free. You pay by the minute for being there. It deletes the exact disease I have been describing, the pressure to keep buying to justify your chair. It is the only cafe I know where the room itself is honestly the product.

A WHY is not a force field!

I have to be honest, or you should not believe the rest of this. Standing for something is necessary. It is not a guarantee.

Blue Bottle stood for third wave purism, a whole rebellion against industrial coffee, and then sold the majority of itself to Nestle, the most industrial coffee company alive. The coffee is still good. But the community that formed around not being Starbucks now belongs, in part, to something bigger than Starbucks. A genuine why can still be sold.

Cuties Coffee in Los Angeles did everything right. It began as a monthly queer coffee and donuts event years before it was ever a shop. The community literally came before the premises. And it still lost its space in the pandemic and had to survive as a community without a room. Which, if you think about it, is the highest compliment my argument can pay. The belonging outlived the cafe. The value never needed the four walls.

So no. A why is not a force field. Rent still exists. But it is the only thing that gives a customer a reason to feel something, and feeling something is what loyalty is actually made of.

That is why we buy from Mitti Cafe. The coffee is not transcendent, but it is staffed entirely by adults with disabilities, and we want to feel good about ourselves. I am not being cynical. That is the mechanism. A real why hands the customer a reason to feel, and Mitti built its reason into who makes your food, so it cannot be faked and cannot be removed.

When Blue Tokai started, its founders wanted their own country to taste craft coffee. They stood for something. Did they scale the product? Beautifully, to well over a hundred rooms. Did they scale the feeling of a movement? I am genuinely not sure. And that uncertainty is the most interesting thing about them.

Scaling a taste is a solved problem. Scaling the belonging around it might not be.

So, back to bed

When you quit your 9 to 5 to open a cafe, you decided to fight the system to make a living. You believed it would bring you peace and happiness. You are wrong, but that needs another article.

The only people that come to my mind, living this narrative successfully are Anant Singh and Karishma Pursnani from Babka Goa. Two self-taught bakers who obsessed over the bread and stayed small while everyone around them scaled. One must read their Google review replies to understand what taking a stance means as a brand. It’s one way of going about it.

When I advise future cafe owners, I tell them to start from a community you already have, or a belief you would hold even if the cafe failed, and let the cafe be its room. As an operator in hospitality I can tell you, food service is a different animal from every other business, and a beautiful room is the easiest part of it to copy.

I am still in my pajamas, by the way. Still scrolling. And maybe that is the real reason I am not at a cafe tonight. Not the coffee. Not the time. No one has offered me a spot where I will meet people like myself.

It’s 2024,

As I walk into my 45 year old celebrity dermatologist’s aesthetic office, I feel jealous of her glistening skin and probably a BMI of 20. I felt shame, and then the feminist in me felt shame for feeling shame.

I have sensitive skin, which I was mostly ok with. I was 34 then, my BMI was questionable at the time, but with my Nepali genes I am naturally blessed with good skin. TG.

Honestly, I don’t even know why I paid Rs. 7,500 (USD 75) for that appointment.

I didn’t really have any concern, except I wanted to stop spending vicariously on random skin stuff on the basis of my mood. I was in an unhealthy relationship with Sephora, Nykaa and Komal Basith.

Instead I wanted to justify my spends with a dermat prescription. I wanted to make an informed decision :)

She tells me how I have started developing fine lines and how Biologique Recherche can fix this really well and needs to be started right away, in such a nonchalant way that you are even embarrassed to ask how much it will cost. My bill was around Rs. 95,000 (USD 1,000). She also prescribed me Nutrova Collagen daily, which was more sugar less collagen???? I obviously had to buy everything from HER clinic.

On the way back home, in self doubt, I was plotting whether I should ever tell any of my friends about this new accomplishment(?!) of mine, and also how to strategically explain to my mother that this was a wise choice.

I was spending A LOT on skincare anyway before, but it was on me - now I have paid a specialist and still didn’t get what I went there for - a vote of confidence on my ever evolving 10 step AM PM routine

At night, I was thinking to myself, did I really behave like a practical and analytical Virgo here? I don’t know why, but I felt stupid. This was two years back, and I still use most of the BR products she recommended. I love them, but I also wonder if this money could have been used better. Maybe a personal trainer, and a good cook?

But what if my skin sags if I don’t do this now? How will I convince myself that I have arrived without my Laneige sleeping mask and Estee Lauder serum?

My dermat had asked me about my dietary preferences and told me she is a semi-vegetarian who eats egg white every day for protein, and how diet is the main thing. When I asked her for a diet plan, she said she doesn’t do that, she can only suggest a basic one, and I will have to find a nutritionist myself. (???)

In my girl gang, the girls with the healthiest skin are not the ones using 30k-a-bottle face creams. They are the ones eating clean and working out. It’s simple. Or just blessed by skin-gene-gods. (Don’t even get me started about the gymholic 45 year old dudes who use bodywash as facewash, my husband’s name is saved as ‘Nivea’ on the phone - That is his only skincare routine!!)

As a kid, I always spent much higher than my counterparts on hair and skin. In the world of Pantene pouches, I used illegally traded Moroccan Oil with a premium on top. Did I know the difference between the two products? Not really. But my hair felt better with one, so efficacy has always mattered. And I loved feeling like I am taking good care of myself.

I decided to have a conversation with my 22 year old niece and her friends about this. They have to look great for the gram, although the definition of great is no longer fair and thin only, but what actually works for them, while optimising the cost. No matter what the rest tells you, the pressure of being fairer might have reduced, but hasn’t fully gone away. Pimples are still a big no-no.

Unable to fight inflation, non-trust-fund kids are always looking for deals and value. You can’t fool them. They don’t get swayed so easily by influencers and ads either. Maybe they will hear them out, but they only purchase when someone credible recommends it and someone cool wears it too.

(Indie brands should not use that seed fund for AI generated paid ads, that CAC is not going to make any sense in the long run)

But for millennials, skincare has never been just about results. It is a ritual, the AM and PM mental health check to convince ourselves everything will be just fine. I don’t know about you, but I can’t do any skincare when I am PMSing :( No skincare can make me feel great at that time.

Skincare as a category grew from the insecurity of being a dark-skinned human, and is now catering to an audience trying hard to own themselves exactly as they are. They don’t want fairer skin, they want clearer skin. They fight against racial discrimination, they don’t want to depend on Instagram filters for presentable skin. They want products made FOR THEM.

Demographic differences were the game of yesterday. Understanding hyper-local cultural nuances is what makes the skincare game work now.

Outsourcing to the same global suppliers and figuring out nice packaging is not enough. Consumers want to know the story of the R&D, and the communication has to be clear about why this product exists, who it is for, and what it does exactly. How is it better than what already exists? The story of the founder is not enough. A celebrity founder might give additional eyeballs, but they have to go through the same tests as any other brand.

Investment and bigger marketing budgets only help if you have a unique story to tell. Over-reliance on ads only leads to a Sugar or Plum business output, and with trust in influencers falling, how is the consumer actually buying skincare, and more importantly, how are they re-buying from the same brand?

Marc Puig (chairman & CEO, Puig - owns Charlotte Tilbury, Byredo, Rabanne, Jean Paul Gaultier) says this better than any ad man: “You have to create this scenario, this theatre, that expresses why this brand is different, what’s the different point of view. We’re good at telling stories.”

With the category flooded with so much noise, consumers tired of 12-step routines, low on trust, and mostly just confused and upset with their bank accounts, more-is-more is not really working for skincare. They are looking for a more organised skincare program, simpler routines, and cost-effective solutions.

So who are they actually buying from?

I am worried about the density of founder led indie brands on the rise, when consumers are not buying the founder anymore. It stresses me out to see that every consumer is on social media platforms, and the trust and connection with brands in on the decline instead.

Do I really care if Deepika Padukone makes something that is fluff on top of more fluff and sells it as premium luxury? Do I listen when a founder I have never seen is making GRWM reels on instagram?

Across the world, only 13 out of every 100 people say the founder is a real reason they buy their most-used brand. Performance says 39. Price says 24. The founder sits below both, below even “it smells nice”.

In the last twenty years, only three founder-led brands anywhere crossed a billion dollars, Fenty, The Ordinary, Charlotte Tilbury.

Rare Beauty is almost there, and Selena Gomez, one of the most famous women on the planet, shows up in only 8 percent of the conversation about her own brand.

The Ordinary was built on purpose to outgrow the people who made it. Its own team says the goal was to become bigger than the founder.

We are the last holdouts. Indian millennials paid a premium for a face and a coat, we over-indexed on celebrity founders and on doctor-founded skincare more than almost any market on earth.

But my niece cannot name a single founder in her routine (except Indē Wild :/) She can tell me the exact percentage of niacinamide in each bottle. She re-purchases Minimalist because it provides exactly what it says, for a good value and comes in 10 minutes on Blinkit. The founder was never the moat. In India it is just a melting ice cube.

Watch what she does instead of trusting a name. She mixes. An expensive moisturiser over a massy serum, on the same face, without a flicker of guilt. Indians do this more than anyone on earth, more than half of us deliberately combine expensive and cheap brands in one routine, against 48 in a hundred in the US and 36 in France. She splurges on the two things that have to work and saves on the eight that don’t. Her routine is a portfolio, and she is the fund manager.

PS - It is very important for skin care brands to have hero products to make sure that they have entry in the routine at least.

None of this is only an Indian story, but ours has a specific shape, and we flatten it when we say fairness creams, then we grew up. Skincare in India came in waves.

The first was colour, Fair & Lovely in 1975, an anxiety sold as a jar, and the boomers bought it without irony because they wanted to get that job, get married, even make friends!!!

The second was foreign, through the 2000s and 2010s the aspiration was not fairness, it was an imported serum on your shelf, a Korean essence, a French pharmacy brand, proof you had arrived. That wave still holds at the very top. It is also the exact wave Minimalist and D’you attacked, they gave us the imported formula without the import.

The third wave was the ingredient itself, the label became the brand, and that is where millennials like me live, trusting a percentage more than a promise. Sometimes it was clean, natural, and then it was ingredient forward, even sustainable and vegan?

The fourth is my niece, and it has no name yet, so I will give it one, value fluency, she is loyal to no price tier and treats the mixing itself as intelligence. The West ran the same waves in a different order and produced Deciem and e.l.f. Boomers bought the promise. We bought the proof. Gen Z buys the value equation and does the maths themselves.

For the HNI of all age groups, at the very top, a high price is still the product, not the cost of it, Veblen named it a century ago and it still holds, in the Gulf, around 90 percent consider beauty affordable, and more buyers there call premium prices justified than in any other market. But everyone below them has quietly walked out of the premium.

63 out of 100 people no longer believe an expensive product works any better than a cheap one. The moment The Ordinary (or Minimalist) taught us all to read a label, and the moment we realised the same contract factory fills the 300-rupee bottle and the 3,000-rupee one, the price stopped carrying any information.

An interesting fact about the skin and beauty industry is that a dupe carries no shame. Over half of us are open to buying one, nearly 60 percent in makeup, and a quarter have done it knowingly. Compare that to a fake handbag, which makes you a fraud, because a bag’s value is public, it lives in the logo other people see. A serum’s value is private, it lives on your own face where nobody is watching and only the result counts. You cannot fake a status symbol without becoming fake. You can absolutely dupe a moisturiser and feel clever. My niece is not cutting corners. In her head she is winning, and she is right.

Discounting your way to reach the Genz audience is surrender, not strategy. Cut your price and you are agreeing with them that the premium was never real. Kiko Milano learned this the hard way, three years ago 80 percent of their sales were on promotion and low price had come to mean low quality. They did not discount harder. They walked out of drugstores, replaced promotions with services and hero products people ask for by name, and raised prices through the mix. Their margins expanded. A discount buys you this month. A reason to believe buys you the decade.

So here is my call, and we will put it on the record and grade it in the open. Before December 2027, another Indian skincare brand will cross 500 crore in revenue and still be net-profitable. It will not be the one with the most famous founder, and it will not be the one with the deepest discount. It will be the one that owns a problem Indian skin actually has, our sweat, our sun, our water, our summer, a problem no imported brand ever bothered to solve.

And if you are the founder trying to build that brand, trying to find your own ‘Hustle’, or trying to sell to HUL for a mindboggling price, your customers are quietly telling you exactly what to do. Stop building for a demographic. Targeting only an age or a gender or a skin colour does not reliably win, it just shrinks your market, and my niece proves it, she does not want a brand that looks like her, she wants one that solves her problem.

So own a problem, not a person. That is the one place a dupe cannot follow you, because you can only copy a formula that already exists. Then use the single advantage you have that the funded giants cannot buy back, you are small, so you are fast, even Amorepacific (Laneige, Sulwhasoo, Cosrx), a global giant, now admits it studies indie brands to learn how to move. And build one hero product and one story worth repeating, so the value is obvious without a discount, so my niece looks at your expensive bottle and thinks, that is the one that doesn’t have a dupe yet.

Because she will mix high and low for the rest of her life. The only question you get to answer is which side of her routine you are on. Be the line she refuses to swap.

It was a plain line, but it captured the category.
Most Indians did not go hunting for single-origin beans.
They were looking for neutral ground.
Coffee simply became the ticket in.

Everything that followed grew from that simple need. Let me expand on that.

1. CCD and the Architecture of Modern Indian Youth

Café Coffee Day did not pioneer specialty coffee.
It innovated a space to breathe freely.

In the late nineties and early 2000s, CCD became the first place where young Indians could sit without obligation.

• You were allowed to stay for hours.

• You could have a date without embarrassment.

• You could meet friends without parents hovering.

• You could pretend to be independent before adulthood gave you permission.

CCD was making amazing frappes, but it was selling time, privacy and possibility.
That turned out to be a much stronger product.

The rest of the market simply built better versions of that same feeling.

2. The Economy That Made Coffee Inevitable

By the early 2010s, three forces collided.

• Urban disposable income rose fast enough to make a 250 rupee drink feel like a manageable indulgence.

• Indian cities built malls, high streets and commercial boulevards at a rate that outpaced cultural imagination.

• A generation entered the workforce earlier, earned earlier and needed neutral meeting spaces that were not bars or office cafeterias.

These three ingredients created natural demand for cafés, even before the coffee improved.

The category was pushed by economics.

3. The Cultural Shift That Turned Cafés Into Safe Highs

Somewhere around the late 2010s, cafés took on a different role.

• Young Indians began preferring cafés to bars.

• Black coffee replaced beer as the default “evening drink” for many early career professionals.

• Aesthetic cafés turned into weekend destinations.

• Cold brew replaced cocktails at study sessions.

• There were even early versions of coffee raves.

This was more than a wellness culture.
It was about safety, identity, mobility and a kind of modern intimacy that Indian families never fully offered.

Cafés became the social lubricant of a generation that wanted stimulation without the consequences of alcohol and noise.

This cultural shift laid the foundation for the new wave of Indian brands.

Checkout this Video - WTF are Craft Beverages? Nikhil Kamath ft. the Founders of Blue Tokai, Subko, Svami, and Mossant.

4. The Café as India’s Micro Office

A subtle pattern emerged across coffee chains in the last five years.
Cafés became the unofficial headquarters for freelancers, remote workers and early stage founders.

You can see it any weekday afternoon.
People sit with laptops for four hours.
They order one drink, then stretch it across a work session.

Cafés now consciously design for this.

• Charging points.

• Plugs beneath long tables.

• Ambient playlists.

• Neutral lighting.

• Comfortable seating that looks relaxed but holds posture for hours.
  This is the quiet alignment of India’s work culture with its café culture.

The Indian café is now a hybrid space.

Part office.
Part dining room.
Part social hub.
Part third place.

This hybridisation created fertile ground for the country’s more expressive coffee brands.

5. Blue Tokai and the Rise of Indian Coffee Literacy

Blue Tokai did something deceptively simple.
They made good coffee normal.

In 2012, when they began roasting in a bedroom on a 500 gram tabletop machine, most urban Indians had never tasted freshly roasted beans.
Origins and varietals were trivia, not buying criteria.
Even farmers doubted that local consumers would pay for quality.

Blue Tokai ignored all of that.
They focused on better sourcing, better roasting and better cups.
They did it consistently enough to recalibrate the national baseline.

Every chain that came after benefitted from the palate Blue Tokai developed.
Every café that serves decent coffee is standing on the competence they normalised.

This is true category correction.

6. Subko and the Birth of Indian Coffee Aesthetic Culture

If Blue Tokai created Indian coffee literacy, Subko created Indian coffee aspiration.

Subko launched with a fully formed world.
Architecture that felt crafted.
Typography that felt intentional.
Packaging that felt collectible.
A bakehouse program that rivalled their roastery.
A global Indian identity that did not imitate the West but could sit comfortably beside it.

Subko’s contribution is not limited to taste.
It is cultural.
They established cafés as sensory environments and brand universes, not commodity retail.

For the first time, India saw coffee as a creative capital.

7. The 250 Rupee Rule and the Economics of Coffee Desire

Across operators, one pattern appears consistently.
India has a very specific price ceiling for discretionary beverages.

The 250 rupee mark is the comfort zone.
Below it, people buy without thinking.
Between 250 and 320, they pause but proceed.
Above 350, they begin to question value and proportion.

Cafés design their menus around this psychology.
Cold brews hover near the ceiling.
Pastries fill the profitable middle.
Food plates justify upselling.
Signature drinks sit at the aspirational edge.

The Indian coffee category is not premium in the Western sense.
It is premium within a calibrated local range.

8. Boojee and the Architecture of Warm Excess

Boojee is not Subko’s younger cousin and not Blue Tokai’s stylish sibling.
It is something else entirely.

Boojee did not begin as a big, heavily branded chain. It began as a small Carter Road–adjacent café in Bandra that people mostly found because they saw a crowd outside or heard about it from friends. The space was compact, the seating limited, but the mood was consistently described as cozy and welcoming.

In a neighbourhood where casualness passes for a dress code, Boojee offered a version of comfort that felt very Bandra: slightly stylish, informal, and easy to slip into.

Boojee also does something interesting for an Indian brand. It feels locally rooted in its use of textures, comfort foods and spices without leaning heavily on retro “childhood memory” aesthetics. The interiors look contemporary, the plates feel current and the Instagram appeal comes from colour and composition rather than overt nostalgia props.

In the broader coffee landscape:

• Blue Tokai raised the quality baseline.

• Subko turned coffee into cultural theatre.

• Boojee proved that you can build loyalty around warmth and habit, starting from a small Bandra lane and growing into a chain people recognise and still line up for on a Sunday.

9. Starbucks and the Limits of Global Familiarity

Starbucks occupies a strange space in India.
It is aspirational yet rarely beloved.
Crowded yet rarely culturally central.
Present everywhere yet not deeply rooted anywhere.

The brand arrived with global familiarity as its main strength.
But India’s coffee consumer matured in a different direction.
Local chains learned faster.
They designed better spaces.
They offered food that felt closer to Indian habits.
They invested in aesthetic coherence at a level Starbucks never adapted to.

In several markets, when a Blue Tokai or Subko opens next door, Starbucks loses its share quietly.

It remains a safe option, but not the preferred one.

The aura of international prestige does not stretch as far as it once did.

10. The Tier 2 Coffee Boom and the Next Market Battle

There is a new theatre of competition.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

These markets behave differently from metros.
They treat cafés as lifestyle markers.
They photograph more.
They linger longer.
They demonstrate stronger brand loyalty.
They are more excited about new cafés than new malls.

Chains like Blue Tokai and Third Wave are expanding aggressively here.
Starbucks faces headwinds because its real estate equation does not always fit.
Boutique brands find opportunity because novelty spreads faster.

These cities may determine the true scale of India’s coffee industry in the next decade.

11. Strategy Disorder Takeaway

Coffee did not change India.
India changed, and coffee fit the gap.

Young people needed spaces that were safe, comfortable and expressive.
Urban professionals needed flexible environments for work.
Families needed informal meeting rooms.
Creators needed backdrops.
Couples needed neutral ground.
Students needed stimulation.
Everyone needed a small, permissible luxury within reach.

Coffee shops stepped into that vacancy and built a culture around it.

The next decade of Indian coffee will be shaped by the meanings cafés create and the behaviours they enable.

The brands that understand this will not just roast beans or decorate walls.
They will shape how India socialises, works and imagines itself.

They will build the rituals that define modern Indian life.

Yet there they stand, hopeful and caffeine deprived, convinced that whatever Bakehouse pulls out of its ovens this morning will justify the wait.

The irony is simple. The line is not a malfunction in the system.
In Asia, the line is part of the experience.
Perhaps not invented here, but certainly perfected here.

THE SETUP: WHY ASIA TREATS LINES LIKE MICHELIN SIGNALS FOR FREE

In many Western cities, a long queue can feel like friction or poor planning.
In Asia, it often communicates something entirely different: competence, care, and culinary promise.

A line outside a restaurant acts like social underwriting.
It tells passersby that the crowd knows something worth knowing.

And that collective belief is potent enough to bend streets around storefronts.

THE LINE AS THEATRE

Most restaurants did not intend to become landmarks of waiting. Their tight interiors are usually byproducts of rent pressure, heritage buildings, or neighborhood constraints.

But when demand surpasses capacity, the line becomes a visual declaration.
An unplanned billboard.
A public endorsement.

Consider Asia’s most photographed queues:

• Bakehouse in Hong Kong with timed pastry drops and a near-mythical egg tart

• Din Tai Fung in Taipei (and worldwide) where the kitchen runs like choreography

• Tim Ho Wan in Hong Kong fueled by a Michelin star and global curiosity

• Ichiran and Tsuta in Tokyo where ramen borders on engineering

• Tiger Sugar in Taiwan with its boba spectacle

• Seoul’s bakery wave driven by restless culinary experimentation

What draws people here is not the size of the room but the certainty of what arrives on the plate. The line outside is just the visible trace of that reputation.

WHY QUEUE CULTURE EXPLODED IN ASIA RECENTLY

If lines have always existed, they have multiplied dramatically over the past few years. Several forces accelerated the shift:

The sidewalk quietly became Asia’s most consistent discovery engine.

ASIA’S QUEUE PSYCHOLOGY: FACTUAL, NOT FANTASY

1. Japan: Queues As Respect

Japan’s lines are an extension of the kitchen. A sign of mastery, not hype.
When a chef has spent decades refining broth or technique, waiting becomes a gesture of appreciation.

Examples abound:

• Sushi Dai at Toyosu

• Nakiryu’s Michelin recognized ramen

• Ichiran’s original Fukuoka counter

• Gyukatsu Motomura in Shibuya

• Fluffy pancake cafes with near religious followings

These lines speak softly but carry authority.

2. Hong Kong: Queues As Scarcity Reality

In a city where space is a luxury, limited capacity is unavoidable.
Bakehouse never set out to create a spectacle. The city simply showed up faster than the ovens could keep up.

3. Singapore: Queues After Recognition

Hawker Chan did not win its Michelin star because of a crowd.
Craft and consistency earned the award.
The international frenzy, and the hour long lines, followed.

In Singapore, a queue often arrives once the credibility is already secure.

4. South Korea: Trend Acceleration

Korean queue culture grows from a perfect storm:

• TikTok and Xiaohongshu

• destination neighborhoods like Seongsu dong

• influencer ecosystems

• rapid seasonal cycles

Korea’s lines are what happen when a trend hungry culture meets a hyper connected generation.

5. Taiwan: Queues As Living Reviews

Night markets, boba shops, bakeries.
Taiwan treats lines as indicators of trust, particularly in tourist dense areas.

THE REAL DRIVERS: PRODUCT, BRAND, AND THE CHEF

The most persistent myth in food culture is that a small dining room creates a line.
Crowds gather for craft, not floorplans.

There are three forces behind every durable queue.

1. PRODUCT: THE NON NEGOTIABLE

A long wait can only survive if the first bite earns it.

Examples include:

• Bakehouse’s sourdough egg tart

• Din Tai Fung’s xiao long bao, delivered with astonishing uniformity

• Tim Ho Wan’s baked BBQ pork bun

• Ichiran’s single focus ramen

• Korean pastries that sell out in hours

• Taiwanese night market classics refined by generations

If the product falters, the line fades.

2. BRAND: MEANING, NOT MARKETING

These restaurants do not rely on visual identity solely. Their identity is revealed through behavior.

Din Tai Fung
Predictability becomes an art form. You queue because you trust the outcome.

Bakehouse
A morning ritual built around the anticipation of fresh batches.

Tim Ho Wan
Craft and value in the same breath create global magnetism.

Ichiran
Solitude becomes philosophy. The queue is the quiet threshold to an intimate experience.

A brand lives in the expectation that draws people to the door, not in the typography above it.

3. CHEF OR FOUNDER AS TRUST ANCHOR

Asia has a particular fondness for culinary guardians.

• Grégoire Michaud at Bakehouse

• Yang Bing Yi at Din Tai Fung

• Mak Kwai Pui at Tim Ho Wan

• Tokyo’s ramen masters

• Fourth wave Korean bakers

• Night market vendors in Taiwan whose reputations span decades

Here, the chef is the guarantee. The room matters far less than the person whose craft fills it.

WHY PEOPLE LOVE TO HATE QUEUE RESTAURANTS

Backlash is part of the lifecycle.
A restaurant is not truly famous until someone calls it overrated.

Why the resentment?

1. The overhype reflex. Declaring something overrated feels like insider knowledge.

2. Early adopter gatekeeping. Once a place becomes mainstream, the original fans retreat.

3. Value auditing. Every bite is measured more harshly after a long wait.

4. Influencer fatigue. Viral attention invites skepticism.

5. Authenticity debates. Taste becomes competitive, almost territorial.

The good news is - Hate does not always signal decline. Sometimes it signals arrival.

THE INFLUENCER QUEUE PIPELINE

Influencers amplify queues. They do not create them.

• TikTok magnifies sensory appeal

• Instagram builds visual desire

• Xiaohongshu directs tourism

• Google Maps reinforces credibility

Poor restaurants cannot sustain lines.
Strong ones cannot escape them.

CASE STUDY: POMODORO (MUMBAI)

How A 22 Seater Built A Citywide Ritual From Fresh Dough And Honest Strategy

When Rare Ideas worked with Pomodoro, the brief was deceptively simple.
Take pasta, a dish available on every menu in the city, and make it matter.

So how does a tiny space in Bandra build a city-wide pilgrimage pattern for a product the market considers “standard fare”?

By doing the one thing almost nobody else was willing to do:

Owning the category by elevating the basics.
Not reinventing them.
Not over-complicating them.
Just… doing them properly, and communicating it with clarity.

Pomodoro’s answer was to elevate fundamentals.

The Product

• Fresh dough rolled daily by hand

• Durum wheat with no shortcuts

• Ingredient first cooking

• Live pasta making that diners could witness

• Recipes anchored in Italian correctness

The Narrative

Rare Ideas’ strategy was to build authentic category ownership for Pomodoro.

The story wasn’t:

• “We’re the first to make pasta in Mumbai.” (They’re not.)

• “We’re reinventing Italian cuisine.” (Thank God, no.)

• “We’re fusion with a twist.” (Absolutely not.)

The real narrative, the one diners felt in their bones, was:

“This is how Italians make pasta: fresh, simple, disciplined.
And we’re not diluting that.”

That’s category leadership built on truth.

The Experience

Its 22 seat space created intimacy. Guests did not just taste the dish. They witnessed its creation.

The Strategy

Rare Ideas shaped the language around what already existed.

• Codified the craft forward philosophy

• Positioned Pomodoro as the benchmark for Italian correctness

• Turned live pasta making into a part of the dining experience and brand narrative

• Framed fresh pasta as the category standard

Over time, Pomodoro’s regulars multiplied, and the small queue outside turned into a quiet ritual of appreciation for work done well.

WHICH COUNTRY HAS THE STRONGEST LINE CULTURE IN ASIA

Japan, without question.

Queues there are ritualized and deeply respected. They reflect appreciation, not impatience.

Examples include:

• Sushi Dai at Toyosu

• Gyukatsu Motomura

• Nakiryu and Tsuta

• The original Ichiran in Fukuoka

• Kissaten style cafes with limited counter seats

These lines are orderly, silent, and self regulated.

In Japan, a line often reflects admiration for the craft rather than a tactic to draw attention.

STRATEGY DISORDER TAKEAWAY: THE SIDEWALK AS CEREMONY

Asia does not queue for the sake of inconvenience.
It queues because food is identity, mastery commands patience, and craft deserves attention.

Bakehouse. Din Tai Fung. Tim Ho Wan. Ichiran. Tsuta. Tiger Sugar.
Different cities. Different traditions. Same gravitational pull.

Across Asia, the restaurants that stay relevant are shaped by meticulous kitchens, craft driven founders, and stories that travel faster than their seating capacity ever could.

As long as the food delivers on the promise, the line will always be worth it.