<p>Three-year-old lifestyle electronics brand, boAt has figured out a winning formula in a cluttered market</p>

- Himanshu Kakkar

Why name an electronic accessories’ brand boAt? The 36-year-old co-founder Aman Gupta points to the brand’s tagline, ‘plug into nirvana’, placed in large letters on a wall of the young start-up’s Hauz Khas office in Delhi. “When you take a boat, you leave everything behind. You plug into a new zone,” he says.

Philosophical meaning apart, the brand has literally plugged into a new zone. Started in 2016, it retails in products such as chargers, Bluetooth speakers and earphones, has already crossed an impressive 1 billion sales in its third year.

It is an impressive show and was done with little outside support. The founders hardly raised any money in the first two years. The only funding round was in May 2018, from Kanwaljit Singh of Fireside Ventures, who invested 60 million in the brand. “I was impressed by their ability to spot a white space, the founder’s experience, the product quality and right targeting,” says Singh. His fund usually invests in early-stage consumer product companies. Gupta sounds assured, saying with a laugh, “While others have burn rate, we have earn rate.” boAt Lifestyle has remained Ebitda positive from its early days.

The business model is pretty straightforward. The products are designed keeping Indian customer’s particular needs in mind, manufactured in China, marketed over social networks and sold mostly over e-commerce platforms. It seems like an obvious winning bet, but that’s not what everyone told him at first. “It is a cluttered sp