boAt Lifestyle is a company that has just started to sail in the deep sea of audio devices market. However, the numbers are promising for them as they continuously rise amidst all the competition. The company struggled in its initial two years. Aman and Sameer had started with a capital of around 3 million, coming from the two founders.

In 2019, boAt audio was the leading brand with a 27.3 percent market share in the ear wear category. In FY 2020, it clocked a revenue of Rs 500 crore, up by 108.8 percent from Rs 239.44 crore in FY 2019, while the business has been profitable for five years straight.

In its initial days, boAt sold its products mainly on e-commerce platforms- Amazon and Flipkart. Today, the company is present in 5,000 retail stores, supported by 20 distributors. The company claims to be selling 10,000 units a day and four million units per year. It says it has served more than 20 million Indians till now.

idea behind boAt?

boAt Lifestyle doesn’t boast of a very prevalent history. It is a Delhi-based startup that was started in 2016 by Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta. The company term itself as a lifestyle brand that deals in fashionable consumer electronics. boAt Lifestyle was started with the sole aim of bringing affordable, durable, and more importantly, ‘fashionable’ audio products and accessories to millennials.

Having started as a cable manufacturer and seller company, today, it has expanded its catalog. Now it sells a wide variety of fashionable electronic goods ranging from travel chargers and premium cables to headphones, earphones, speakers. The company is steadily growing and extending its services to millions of ‘boAtheads’ (A term the company uses for all its consumers and brand ambassadors). It has been only four years since the journey but the company stands tall with more than 800,000 happy customers.

Reasons behind their success

There is no single mantra for success. It requires connecting several dots to form a line. boAt is no exception in the terms of the process. However, they modified their approach from the beginning when they projected themselves as a lifestyle brand and kept on improvising. There are several factors that put boAt on the road to success.

•Consumer-first approach and improvisations

The company has a specific term for its community of users. Anyone who owns a boAt product is anointed as boAthead and made a part of the clan. This gives users a feeling of belongingness. The company believes in closely observing the needs of users and developing products accordingly. Its first product was an indestructible Apple charging-cable and charger. The product was developed after the founders sensed it’s urgency.

Sanjeev Mehta said, “The Apple cable used to break near the charging end (near the connectors). People used to make do, by taping over it. So we launched a tough, braided cable, with a life cycle of 10,000 bends”. Some of the key insights over the past three years have been that people are increasingly looking for sports and fall-proof headphones, and that boAt’s products were getting boring. The start-up, therefore, launched fall-proof headphones and introduced interesting colors for their products.

•Portrayal as a lifestyle brand

The company portrays itself as a lifestyle brand rather than calling a consumer electronics brand. This strategy was on display at the 2019 Lakmé Fashion Week in Mumbai where boAt products were the only accessories sported by the models when they walked down the ramp for one of the designers.

After launching the indestructible Apple charging-cable and charger, the second product they brought was an audio range, which included earphones. The company used critical insight on consumers to decide that Indians love bass. Their first earphones were called BassHeads.

The organized earphones market was estimated to be between 30 billion to 40 billion, and it was growing at 20-30% annually. In 2018, boAt launched speakers and, in 2019, soundbars and home-audio systems. The soundbar is priced at 9,000 and it sells 30 to 40 units a day; its sales were expected to hit 200 million to 300 million in 2019.

•Right targeting

boAt lifestyles are reckoned as millennials’ brands. The company provides stylish and affordable products that attract the youth. Also, the brand ambassadors are all young faces. Much of the buzz boAt has picked up can be attributed to its brand ambassadors who represent India’s most-followed passions (and obsessions) – Bollywood and cricket. The company even develops products specifically for young people. For instance, Sports Earphones and Bluetooth Speakers have caught the fancy of India’s increasingly fitness-focussed millennials. Consumers pick and choose accessories that fit in their workouts, trails, hikes, basically their lifestyle.

•Online marketing

The company has stuck to online modes to market their products. The brand has stayed away from conventional media such as TV and print. They have mostly run their campaigns on Facebook and other Social Media networks. One of the founders cited the reason being millennials mostly online. Pankaj Mirchandani, managing partner at Rhythm Corner Alaknanda (RCA), a marketer and distributor of electronics in India, says, “What has worked for boAt is the community of fans they have built online, which is quite commendable”. There is now an online community of boAtheads with around 80,000 members at present. The company also uses Celebs word-of-mouth as their Marketing Strategy.