While modern founders are known to pick growth over profitability in their early years, FILA 2022 Outstanding Startup winner boAt's cofounders Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta have watched their bottomline with a hawk's eye since the first year of operations, and it has catapulted the audio and wearables company to the top across categories
Aman Gupta marries his marketeer DNA with a sense of humour when asked why co-founder Sameer Mehta and he chose to name their wearables venture boAt. “A for Apple, B for Boat. It’s easy to recall… that’s how they teach you in kindergarten, isn’t it,” he laughs. “But there is a real answer too.”
When Gupta and Mehta hired an agency to pick a name for the flagship product of Imagine Marketing, an audio distribution company they launched in 2013, a number of options—Sonic and Audio Zoom to name some—were up for grabs. “But we wanted to create a lifestyle brand, and wanted a name that didn’t have an audio connotation. The meaning of boAt has to be read with its tagline–Plug Into Nirvana. Whenever you ride into the water, you leave your worries behind. It’s just the feeling when you plug into a boAt product—you get into a zone of your own,” says Gupta, co-founder and chief marketing officer.
(This story appears in the 08 April, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)