Courtesy White Owl Brewery

Before coming to business school, Javed Murad (MBA 2008) was not much of a beer drinker. The brews on offer in his native India were primarily mass-produced lagers, and he just didn’t like the taste. While at HBS, however, he discovered the much wider world of craft beer at the bars of Harvard Square—and carried that affinity with him to New York, where he took a job in finance at Perella Weinberg. At a Whole Foods located on the first floor of his apartment building, Murad could fill a growler with an ever-changing assortment of ales and stouts. “There was nothing special about it,” he says. “I took it for granted.”

It was a convenience Murad missed when he’d return to India for his biannual visits. “I’d say to friends, ‘Let’s go grab a beer’ and realized very quickly that it was the same stuff that was available 10 or 15 years ago.” Murad wanted to start something of his own; craft beer was clearly an opportunity. There were already a few competitors in the market—but what a market: Much of India is below the poverty line, but even one-fifth of the country represents roughly 275 million consumers, the majority of whom have yet to experience the hoppy bitterness of an IPA.

To change that, Murad launched White Owl Brewery in his hometown of Mumbai in 2014. A few years later, contract manufactured at plants in northern and southern India, White Owl currently offers four different brews in bottles and cans at retail outlets and bars in New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Goa, and Bangalore. When the pandemic hit, White Owl went from monthly revenues of over 50 million INR to zero overnight as bars and stores shut down. In the first week, Murad estimates he spoke to 30 or 40 investors, mentors, and friends who were running similar businesses. “I realized quickly that almost no one knew what they were doing—everyone was playing a guessing game because the situation was so unprecedented. But people who had been through crises in the past advised me to go into military mode immediately.” For White Owl, that meant suspending marketing contracts and rental expenses to preserve jobs. Now, as India begins a massive vaccination program, Murad is glad to have made it through the worst of the pandemic with White Owl’s workforce of 120 employees largely intact. “It’s easy to abandon ship or do something that isn’t a good legacy move,” he reflects. “When things get tough, character is important.”

While craft beer remains a young concept for Indian consumers, Murad is energized by the challenge of making it an accepted part of the beverage landscape. And it helps that the entrepreneurial climate in India is different from when he grew up. “Generally speaking, people were more defensive and pessimistic, with a strong focus on income stability,” he says.“Now there’s a greater sense of the rewards that come from doing something interesting that you enjoy.”

How to: Introduce consumers to an unfamiliar product

Find your ambassadors. “There are always a few well-traveled, curious people who have been exposed to the category. Find them and make those people pound the table and spread the word for you.” For Murad, this meant inviting beer bloggers to tastings, requesting feedback, and maintaining an active social-media presence.

Keep it simple. “If you go into a community where people have never had spicy food before, you don’t hand them a really hot habanero pepper. That’s too overwhelming to be the gateway spice. The same thing applies to beer.” White Owl offers an Irish red ale and Belgian wit, for example—but early on it also brewed complex stouts, porters, and IPAs to engage potential ambassadors with more experienced palates.

Have a consistent view of your consumer target. A founder’s passion and intuition need to be converted into a clear consumer insight and scalable model. “India remains an extremely price-sensitive market, which is the case for most developing markets, so going niche is not an especially stable model. And as your base gets larger, having a grasp of the data and understanding of consumers’ diverse preferences becomes even more important.”

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