Kanwaljit Singh has been relentlessly stoking the direct-to-consumer fire in India. Can his Fireside Ventures stay fired up?
Bengaluru, October, 2014.
There were quite a few suitors aggressively wooing PC Musthafa. And why not? Nine years after turning entrepreneur in 2005—when he co-founded iD Fresh Food with his cousins Shamsudeen TK, Abdul Nazer, Jafar TK and Noushad TA—Musthafa had finally relented to ‘marry’. In 2014, the ready-to-cook fresh food brand, more known for idly and dosa batter, had reached a decent scale of operations and was reportedly clocking Rs7 crore monthly sales across eight cities. For Musthafa, it was the right time to start a new innings.
There was a problem, though. The ‘bride-to-be’ was much older than Mustafa. But the age did not matter to him. “I was ‘marrying’ one of the best marketing minds in the world,” recalls the IIM Bangalore alum. There was another small problem. “The ‘bride’ had a beard”, laughs Musthafa. He soon got to know of a third problem: The ‘bride’ was planning to call it quits.