How a brand built me

We just celebrated Nicobar’s 10th anniversary. And as my sons would tell you, I got a lot of ‘glazing’. I was congratulated far more than I was due and humbled by the love this brand has created. Standing in that room, basking in all of it, I asked myself a question: Did I really shape this brand? Or is the more interesting story how the brand shaped me? I think it’s the second one.

I grew up as a Navy kid, playing three or four hours of sport every day. Squash, tennis, and table tennis in the early years. Golf in particular has taught me something I’ve struggled to apply anywhere else: how to focus on the process rather than the result. That’s as true on a fairway as it is in a boardroom.

When I left India in 1987, I wanted to be an American. I was obsessed with all things American: Coca-Cola, Bruce Springsteen, and the like. I worked at Goldman Sachs. But it took until my 30s before I began to realise what India was, to learn more about our history and culture, and to appreciate my Indianness for the first time. I returned to India and an idea began to take shape, that India could modernise without westernising. Nicobar was that idea, made into a brand.

It started with one word. Ubuntu. A beautiful African idea that translates roughly as “I am because we are”.  When you really look at anything you’ve done you see there are so many people who paved the way. We didn’t build Nicobar, not really. We played a part, for sure, but we had the curiosity to surround ourselves with people far more talented and far more patient than

we are. Designers who taught us how to see, storytellers who taught us how to speak, entrepreneurs who showed us you can build something meaningful without losing your soul, and friends who believed in us before it made any sense to do so. We launched Nicobar with an Instagram handle, @nicojournal, which was one part a snapshot of our new line, but equally a platform for what we thought was interesting in contemporary India. A space that explored other entrepreneurs and brand builders doing things that piqued our interest at the time.

So the first thing Nicobar taught me was gratitude. To live with the awareness that I sit inside a deeply interconnected world, and very little of what I claim as mine actually is. A coach I’ve worked with over the years, Darshan, once asked me a question: Is your consciousness expanding or contracting? He said the answer should show up as more interconnectedness, seeing more links between people, between ideas, between the inner and the outer.

Rory McIlroy is one of golf’s greats, and he won his sixth Major this year at the Masters. It took him 11 years to win his fifth Major. Then only one more year to win his sixth. When asked what he felt, he said two words: joy and gratitude. That is how I feel. Not just because Nicobar is turning 10, but most days, probably every day, in various moments.

The entrepreneurial journey is brutal. Your to-do list is never-ending. Ten is an arbitrary number, it isn’t a destination. But amidst all the chaos, the madness, the things falling apart, every single day, something amazing is happening if you bother to look for it. Nicobar has shaped me to seek that joy in everyday life, and to try to build a brand that injects joy into other people’s everyday living too. For me, it shows up as a double espresso first

thing in the morning in my striped kulhar. Or slipping on my organic cotton Nawab shirt with my Shillong Jammies. In yet another sign of our imperfection, these are usually out of stock, not because of demand, but because our creatively-driven org loves to chase the new instead of doubling down on our winners. But that’s a Nicobar problem for another day.

Rory played the first two rounds of the Masters with Mason Howell, an 18-year-old US Amateur winner. Asked what he hoped Mason would take away from those 36 holes, Rory said: “You don’t have to be perfect to shoot a great round. Even pros make mistakes.” This was after Rory shot 5-under and 7-under, setting a Masters record going into round three.

Nicobar has tried to teach me to create an environment where mistakes are okay. And Simran (Lal, wife and co-founder) tells me, mostly unsuccessfully, to be kinder to myself and to others. The entrepreneurial journey isn’t about arriving somewhere. It’s about pit stops, missteps, recalibrations. Beyond everything else, it has taught me to live more in the moment.

Let me be specific about the mistakes I have made, and continue to make.

Mistake one: Culture. Ten years ago, I believed culture was built by the people you chose to hire. I personally interviewed 250 people for our first nine roles. Now, 10 years later, I believe something more nuanced. Culture is built not just by who you hire, but by who you ask to leave, and how you treat them on the way out. And to this day, I do not really know how to ask anyone to actively leave. I avoid it. I delay it. And I think that has hurt Nicobar more than I’d like to admit. The toughest decisions are when forced to choose ‘people first’; or ‘Nicobar first’.

Mistake two: Brand Building. The dominant narrative in our industry pits brand against business, as if you have to choose. I have never been able to fully convince the entire team that brand building is business building. The impact of brand isn’t easy to measure and isn’t visible in the short term. The most important things in life cannot be measured, and in an organisation, brand value remains the hardest to measure. The only way to get close is talking to your customers. They tell you more than any rating or metric I’ve ever seen. On our 10th anniversary, we had deep conversations with over 50 customers and surveyed over 1,200. They tell you whether the brand you are building is also building the business. But true brand builders work with an inner desire and conviction, willing to invest in the journey, knowing the destination and measurability are not clear. I have been lucky to have Simran as the guardian of Nicobar’s soul throughout.

Mistake three: Decision Making. I am slow at making decisions. I deliberate. It has been a strength, and it has hurt the brand on many occasions. But it is my nature. When you look at your entire work as yoga, you do work according to your nature, and it becomes yoga when you cultivate equanimity towards it. As long as you do your best, you enter a state of flow. That reframe has helped me make peace with my pace, even as I’ve recognised it’s exactly why we needed a CEO, someone who can make the operational calls while I focus on the longer-arc decisions that benefit from sitting with them.

Which is why I am now on a journey: from co-founder and CEO, to co-founder only, to one day, hopefully, irrelevance. The real goal is a Nicobar that functions without me, and pulls me in only when it needs me.  I can never really leave Nicobar. It hasn’t only shaped me, it is who I am.

Sunil Mittal, founder of Airtel, once described how companies evolve. They go from being entrepreneurially led and entrepreneurially managed, to entrepreneurially led and professionally managed, to professionally led and entrepreneurially supported, to professionally led and professionally managed. Here was his clincher: he hoped Airtel would never reach that final stage, because if it did, it would lose its soul. That has stayed with me. Maybe what the last 10 years have actually taught me, or what I am still learning, is not how to lead, but how to support.

That, it turns out, is a far richer journey.