Free spirit

Lisa Srao is slowly but steadily cutting into a male-dominated alcoholic beverages segment

A year after Lisa Srao moved to Bengaluru in 2003 just after marriage, her excitement faded and there was only one question on her mind: “What have I done?” 

Born, brought up and educated in the United Kingdom, it wasn’t exactly the culture shock that made her question this decision. “My parents are Punjabis so India wasn’t exactly new to me. I was, in fact, quite excited to relocate. But having lived abroad all my life, I realised that there were several things I took for granted that were a struggle to find in India,” she says. 

It was the fact that international-quality products were not available to the average, middle-income Indian, she says, that irked her particularly. “If I wanted good, world-class biscuits, they would either be overpriced or soggy.” 

Biscuits, though, may be too mundane an example for the chairperson and managing director of a young, alcoholic beverages start-up. On target, by Srao’s own estimates, to hit the Rs 500-crore revenue mark in the next five years, I Brands was set up in 2010 with a vision to bring “premium quality liquor” for a segment that she saw as “underutilised”. 

Before Srao chose liquor for this new venture, it chose her. Her father, Amarinder Srao, conceptualised and launched Double Dutch beer in the UK nearly 15 years ago. “But simply importing that beer to India was not something I wanted to do, in part because the duties were so high.” Srao recalls realising during the “massive amounts of research” that every state in India was a separate country in terms of consumer needs and regulations.

Each state has its own excise laws for liquor and navigating them, especially for someone new to the country and bureaucracy, can be exasperating. “The initial team I hired had people from non-liquor backgrounds. We were baffled by what lay ahead of us,” Srao recalls. For instance, there are different departments for labels and excise permissions. Liquor brands cannot directly market their product through commercials. And the rural market can be particularly tricky, where local liquor shops have little or no display window and marketing is almost purely based on word-of-mouth and other “informal” channels. 

But the learning did happen. With a “contact” in north India who helped her procure licences in Punjab and Haryana, the I Brands team made a slow but steady start by launching its first whisky in 2010. “Since we were all equally clueless, we all learnt together.” For the initial distribution hurdles, Srao’s team adopted the traditional marketing route that involved on-the-spot sampling sessions. The other channel I Brands used was to have its posters placed in bars in places like Chandigarh. 

“Soon, because of our unique packaging, people started identifying the bottle and asking for the product. I often heard people say, ‘Woh kaala waala dena (bring us that black bottle)’,” she says.
 

But it was her first award in 2014 — the IndSpirit Award for Excellence in Packaging for Granton Whisky — that made her realise that the company had finally made it. “I remember being completely taken aback at the ceremony. People from United Spirits and other established companies came and shared their appreciation for our products and it felt surreal.”

Her Punjabi lineage helped her set up a bottling and distilling plant in Dera Bassi near Mohali in Punjab. Her parents belong to the Doaba belt of Jalandhar and Patiala and she often visited her hometown growing up. It was a matter of time before she found the right, young partners in Shobhit Arora and Virender Singh. “Arora has been a family friend and Singh came through the reference of another friend. I Brands, in many ways, has been about the professional bonding we share.” 

Manoj Verma, her husband, is mentioned on the company’s website as an advisor, though Srao insists that their business interests are completely independent. “In the end, it was being in the right place, with the right people at the right time.”

Dressed in a simple pair of black trousers and shirt, Srao appears both at ease and on the edge. Speaking in accented British English that seems almost natural to Punjabis migrating to the UK and Canada, the confidence she exudes comes from the success her company’s products —  Granton Whisky, Three Royals Whisky, Rum 99 and Granton Brandy — have achieved in Tier-II markets such as cities in Haryana and smaller towns in Karnataka.

The edgy quality of her persona appears to stem from the fact that there is still a long way to go for both Srao and her whiskies.

While not yet as popular as other home-grown and young whisky brands such as Amrut and Kuchh Nai in urban Indian cities, the strategy to take the rural and Tier-II and -III route has stood Srao in good stead. “The blend was initially too smooth and we soon realised that the Indian audience wanted something with a stronger taste.” 

Halting this story, Srao lifts up a catalogue to go through each product her company retails. It almost appears as though she is going through an album of photographs of her children. Eyes glinting with pride, the charm and poise she wears as the founder of I Brands gives way to an almost girlish glee when she recounts the number of awards she and I Brands have won.

In an industry that is largely considered to be a male bastion, Srao is, in many ways, a pioneer. Unlike other women entrepreneurs in the alcohol segment — such as Roshni Jayaswal of Jagatjit Industries — Srao did not inherit this business from her father or take the employee route. “When I started out, men would not even talk to me. They would rather speak to a junior in my company who was a man. But then, eventually, the product spoke and the men started listening to me.” 

She started I Brands from scratch, a feat that even those with deep pockets struggle to make. This was also at a time when other home-grown beers and whiskies weren’t all the rage. Today, beers like Bira or even wines like Banyan Tree have made a mark within the niche market they operate in. 

She veers into the personal when she speaks about her daughter Isabella and son Marcus, aged 12 and eight, respectively. “One of the biggest challenges of being a woman entrepreneur is how it clashes with being a mother. There are days when my children get upset when I have to travel too much or cannot cook for them.” 

But, she adds, that it is also important to have a role model in a working mother. “It isn’t easy bringing these two worlds together,” she smiles. Her remarkable journey looks anything but.