Flatheads

“Every shark has called me and said this is unprecedented, right? Throughout the two seasons, they have not seen anything like this, right?”

“Our advisors told us this, that shut down and take a vacation. The voices were there. Okay. And these were voices who have been through multiple, you know, cycles of bad times and good times. This was a once in a generational event for sure, but the voices wer…”

“Functional positioning, you are not able to create the aspiration. So I would have played the brand story a little differently, right? Given a little more of an emotional connect rather than a pure functional connect.”

“I would have paused everything. I would have told people to go take a holiday, right? And come back and we will try when this madness dies down. I would not have spent as much on trying to force the product into the market where the demand was low, which is wh…”

“And I genuinely believe that You know, 70 lakhs is not enough for, you know, creating this all over again. Which is why I said no.”

“Look, I had raised 10 and a half crores for 33% earlier, right?”

“Every week we used to do at least two roadshows, and that worked beautifully well, right? People tried the product, one in three customers who used to walk into our pop-up used to convert into customers.”

“The Indian foot versus the Chinese foot versus the American foot. Versus the European foot is very different. And guess what? We are the second largest consumer of footwear in the world because we are the second largest population in the world. But Indian foot…”

“Right now the company is still very much, you know, pretty much dormant, right? We have done all our supplier negotiations and closed stuff. So we are trying to figure out whether there is a potential home where flatheads can belong. It could be another brand.…”

“So both of us had put in 35 lakhs each. So there's about 70 lakhs of personal liability that we have. Not counting the pre-corporation of the company, one and a half years that we worked, that was about 20, 25 lakhs each.”

“And then when April happened, all the, you know, conversations and potential term sheets that were on the table also went away. So when the demand actually came, we didn't have the marketing money to do something meaningful.”

“So then second wave, we hedged our bets. We decided to go international, right? Zappos had called saying, Hey you know, we need fresh infusion of interesting shoes and USPs for our core audience. So we are opening up an international program. Would you be inte…”

“We got 25 to 30% organic traffic from LinkedIn and Twitter, not from Instagram as a brand, right?”

“Within 38 hours, all the remaining inventory that we had, we sold out.”

“We had some limited inventories in India, and we had inventories in UAE and US, which were selling on autopilot. So that is something that was going on. We said, let it continue. Eventually, this episode will air. So at that time, we'll see what happens. Until…”

“Actually, that was our last ditch effort at You know, keeping flatheads alive. So once the episode was done and we realized that, Hey, there's movement is not forward. So then, you know, we had a lot of conversations with our, you know, suppliers, partners, ev…”