Due to a sluggish start to the fiscal year with steep corrections in the market, the pressure on this year’s festive season is huge. In this brand-exclusive series, we speak to brand custodians to understand their FestiveBrandBrief22 for the upcoming season, which, despite the slow start to the year, is likely to provide a much more high-spirited and profitable fiscal.
In this exclusive FestiveBrandBrief22 interaction, Krishna Chandak, Co-Founder of TEGO, speaks about TEGO’s growth and the growth of activewear in India. Chandak also speaks about the enormous anticipated demand for purpose-driven products and outlines how TEGO leverages digital media to effectively communicate the brand narrative and product story.
Krishna Chandak found himself calling his roommate from nearly ten years ago with an idea to revolutionise and disrupt the Indian Fitness Industry. As with many other D2C brands, TEGO was born out of his own personal pain-points and the need for products in the fitness gear space that was severely lacking in the market. Coupled with identifying macro level data, Krishna and co-founder, Ashish Naik, founded TEGO in 2016, leveraging market dynamics to create an Indian challenger brand with premium appeal. Krishna is an avid fitness enthusiast with a penchant for business development and product management.
With an undergraduate degree in Commerce from Mumbai University, and an MBA from a leading business school in the US, Krishna Chandak began his professional journey at KPMG Advisory in New York, with a focus on financial services consulting engagements.
While with KPMG, Krishna transferred to the Mumbai office in 2011 and continued his journey with the consulting giant. With a strong urge to begin his own entrepreneurial journey, Krishna and Ashish teamed up to bring their ideas to live, giving rise to TEGO in 2016.
A staunch advocate of teamwork and synergies, Krishna Chandak believes that for any venture to be truly successful, a clear purpose and vision must be established, with buy-ins from a multitude of stakeholders that provide a holistic perspective. Currently, Krishna spearheads a team of 15 people and counting at TEGO, and believes that identifying the right people for the job is one of the key metrics for a brand’s success.
Excerpts from the conversation.
What is your 100-word Brief for this festive season?
Since the pandemic, consumer focus has seen a paradigm shift towards elevating their quality of life rather than their social status. With the 2022 festive season being right around the corner, we anticipate a huge demand for purpose driven products rather than impulsive buys. Furthermore, we see a huge opportunity for gifting this festive season.
Overall, we are expecting demand to be robust this festive season, on the back of salary bonuses and improved urban sentiment — especially in premium gifting categories — for both e-commerce and physical stores. With the world bouncing back from challenging circumstances, the health and fitness industry is going to see a massive boost, especially for gifting.
What are the need gaps in the product/service category you compete in? How are you filling those gaps?
The active wear segment is large with sub-categories like performance on one side, and at leisure on the other. Both work very differently, therefore it is critical for a D2C brand like ours to define its niche, and the set of problems that it aims to solve.
TEGO is focussed on building a distilled head-to-toe solution for high quality fitness essentials for a specific consumer group who we call the ‘Everyday Athlete’. For these consumers – Performance Active wear is an involved purchase and they conduct a lot of pre-purchase research.
They seek high functionality and expect the product to have higher longevity/ longer usage duration. Therefore the degree of trust between the brand and customer required is very high as compared to any other consumer category.
Niche active wear brands are gaining traction with millennial consumer groups globally. They are winning over Incumbents by moving quickly on relevant trends to create tight product categories – building a focussed narrative for everyday athlete consumers.
The story in India will be no different; as wallet-share for active wear increases – consumers will experience brand fatigue and demand differentiation. Ultimately, only brands which survive are the ones that can consistently innovate, not only their products, but community-building efforts as well.
We strongly believe TEGO’s success lies in the ability to identify scalable niches and being backed by technology for deep product stories. In essence, follow a simple formula to build a strong presence: identify ignored categories with potential for innovation; evolve into high revenue category leaders and win early adopter customers.
Simplicity is our brand’s DNA, and the goal is to provide distilled head-to-toe gear which is timeless while striking a balance between design and functionality and maintaining an identity of its own.
To achieve this, we focus on selecting Materials and Textile Innovations for Indian weather conditions; fabrics designed for moisture wicking, air permeability, and proven antimicrobial formulations that are certified and tested.
Utmost focus is also given toward designing products for multiple usage occasion, along with attention to fits and sizing that are consistent.
How have your brand – and your brand marketing strategies evolved in these past two years of the pandemic?
We are all about the everyday athlete, through our various digital channels we try and tell real stories of real people who are on the path to achieving some form of increased fitness. Our strategy has been a combination of content, quality storytelling and growth marketing within the overall arch of brand building.
Indian e-commerce consumers have a large spending power which we have been able to harness due to our superior quality products – that is one thing we have always ensured – someone who tries our product would always prefer to use it over others.
We also work with a lot of fitness touch points and create BTL activities that deliver a premium experience and environment for our customers can see and feel TEGO products. This helps in discovery and translates into purchase.
There are several factors that have contributed to our fast growth over the last 18 months. It involved (1) laying groundwork for product development (2) change in channel strategy at the right time with focus on DTC and (3) Strong brand resonance because of the simplicity in our communication that avoids hyperbole.
What is the perfect media mix for your brand?
We focus primarily on digital media to effectively communicate the brand narrative and product story.
Which are the most important categories that will see big uptake in the upcoming Festive season?
As stated earlier, the focus now being elevating their quality of life, individuals will start to think about what would make their gifts more fulfilling and meaningful.
We expect a strong demand in the health and fitness space after a rather subdued previous couple of seasons due to the pandemic. Appreciation for fitness centres and yoga studios is at an all-time high, and so is the demand for fitness apparel and accessories.
Would you recommend more and more brands should also have, in time for the upcoming Festive Season, their own Ecommerce platform on web or app, online, for direct selling to consumers? Why?
There is a high cost associated with developing, building and marketing, creating distribution for your own D2C platform or App – therefore each brand has to determine their own long-term strategy. It will also depend on the nature of the product, number of SKUs, and amount of storytelling required justifying the cost to target the right customers for your brand.
Your marketing campaigns for the festive season – will they be mostly customer-acquisition-focused, or will there be brand building elements too? And how important a role is the emerging AI-powered outdoor medium likely to play?
No single strategy guarantees success or fits every type of brand. Having said that, customer acquisition and brand-building go hand in hand. Premium brands must always prioritise a clear simple compelling brand purpose, which speaks to something deeper than the way a product is designed or delivered.
With regard to AI-powered outdoor mediums – they are becoming more and more important as more engaging content can be deployed to the right consumer at the right time.
