We have had a chance to connect with Millind Bansia, the Co-Founder of FinePeeps. It’s a company that researches, designs and provides products across multiple categories, including beauty, home, wellness, sleep, and fitness. It has multiple brands under it, about which Millind talks with us in detail. He started it out with his partner Daivik Raval who comes from an engineering background.
Milind is an investment and strategy professional with extensive experience in corporate strategy, investment banking, venture capital and entrepreneurship. With a deep passion for technology, Millind looks for new ideas to help innovate his company. Together, Daivik and Millind are focusing on transforming the way physical products are manufactured by designing innovative and creative products. Learn more through our interview with him.
Explain the background of you and the company in detail.
Daivik and I started FinePeeps to change the way physical products are designed and manufactured. As engineers and investors in customer-first technology companies, we saw that most physical products were not designed well enough to truly help customers in their own lives. Most products were designed by the manufacturer with process and economics in mind, with little to no idea about how the product will be used in daily life, what is important for the user, and how to build a relationship with the consumer.
As founders, we come from an engineering and investing background, which spurs our passion for FinePeeps. Daivik is a mechanical engineer and has an MBA. His career has spanned investment banking at J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and private equity investing at Mirae. I am also a mechanical engineer with a career in global finance and technology investments, having been an investment banker at J.P. Morgan (where Daivik and I met), a startup investor at Kalaari Capital, and a D2C entrepreneur (TRU-V).
This background in engineering and investing in customer-obsessed companies gives us the skills to design better products and the drive to obsessively solve problems in customers’ daily lives through our products.
What are your goals?
Our goal is to continuously innovate, create, and market products that raise the joy of living for our customers to the next level and, in doing so, to create brands that are loved and stand for trust.
We want to create a team that can build multiple brands across categories while only increasing the standards our customers and we hold ourselves to.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of yourself/your company right now?
Our biggest strength is our obsessive focus on creating products that add value and help our customers in their daily lives.
What was the path you/your company took to get to where you are today?
Currently, we have 30+ SKUs in 3 brands and are working on a fourth.
Our first brand was BetterClub/BetterMe, which we started in early 2021. The goal of BetterClub was to create products that helped people become better versions of themselves across the beauty, fitness, nutrition, and mental health verticals. We believe that each of these 4 pillars is needed for someone to improve holistically, and you cannot achieve 1 without the other 3. All BetterClub products combine these aspects and are designed user-first, from our performance grip socks, water bottles, and various yoga mats, to beauty products. Our initial products, such as the DivineAlign Yoga Mat (a Lotus-inspired yoga mat with a built-in alignment system) and 2.2L Full Day Water Bottle (with scale and drinking reminders), were very well received.
The BetteClub BetterMe Jade Roller and Gua Sha Facial Spa Kit was, in fact, ranked as the #1 trending product by GulfNews in 2021. We’ve recently launched an innovative volcanic roller that helps clear sweat without disturbing makeup, and we are hoping for similar success.
The second brand we launched was Bloom.Stores that specialize in bamboo products. As engineers, we realized that bamboo is a great material for many uses. Apart from being natural and eco-friendly, it can be used in many ways, from wood replacement to cloth and textiles. Bloom.Stores were made to harness bamboo’s versatility and bring in eco-consciousness through its products. Bloom.Stores make products such as bamboo pillows, bamboo laptop tables, bamboo water bottles, etc.
Our latest brand is called MyUniverse / Mapabliss and is a brand focused on smart and safe parenting. Universe / Mapabliss designs products for parents and kids starting from pre-birth (maternity pillows) to early childhood (baby feeding pillows, #1 on Amazon) and up to 5-7 years old (walkers, baby water bottles). Apart from our own experiences, conversations with parents showed us that safety and smart, scientific design was key consideration while making buying decisions.
The MyUniverse Mapabliss walker, for example, (which is the #1 selling walker on Amazon in the UAE), was designed with safety features from brakes to anti-toppling features as well as smart features like easy storage and multi-use.
Apart from creating new brands and products, we have also expanded from just the UAE to Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the US, with plans to expand into more geographies soon.
Why did you start (or want to be the head of) this company?
Daivik and I started this company because we were unsatisfied with the lack of customer thinking and innovation in products, even in big brands. These products were made without the user-first thinking and empathy that should be present. We wanted to design and market better products with more research and science going into them.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome?
One of the biggest challenges has been accessing capital and increased unfair competition.
We are a very cash-heavy business as we need to keep increasing inventory with sales. So, we always need more capital to be able to put it into inventory. We are looking for partnerships that can get us in debt.
The other challenge has been unfair competition and lower-quality copies. Oftentimes, competitor products claim to do what our products do, but those claims are false. This is rampant in e-commerce and needs to be addressed.
Give us one word that describes you the best.
Customer-obsessed.
What makes you excited about Mondays?
The most motivating reason for us has been customer love. When customers write back about their experiences with our product, whether it be reviews or emails, it really helps keep the team and us going.
We also enjoy creating new and better products and cherish the reception it has with our customers.
What do you value most about your culture and vision?
We want to create a fun and creative culture that is built on the basis of customer empathy. We value having smart & driven people who are innately empathetic towards our customers, and we also care about our colleagues at a personal level.
Tell us about a project that forced you to be innovative and creative.
We design each product from the ground up. Each design is based on user research and feedback as well as an in-depth study of material, usability, and performance. Each product has a unique journey and takes time to create. As a fitness enthusiast, our 2.2L BetterClub BetterMe All-Day Hydration Water Bottle Jug was a win as we could balance many features amongst each other and make the bottle look beautiful. For example, we had to balance having a scale & timer to measure intake while also having thermal insulation through a sleeve. Achieving this in a beautiful way that just clicked was amazing. But a lot of products have the same journey since we design from scratch.
What are the strategies of your company, and how do they stand unique from your competitors?
As a company, we are in the business of creating value for end customers by creating innovative and customer-focused products and creating brands that rigorously follow these principles for all products using the medium of brands. Unlike other brands that start from what the founders are driven by, we work backwards from what users want and how we can make their lives easier. Apart from this deep user focus that drives our every decision, we also focus on content and aesthetics, which we believe are important to stand out in the eyes of the customer.
What are the key values which helped you to overcome the roadblocks/challenges in your career? Tell us something about your memorable incident in your leadership.
Over the years, what has motivated Daivik and I is being user-driven. This is something we saw when we worked with entrepreneurs as investors, and in previous companies, we worked.
From a leadership perspective, hiring for both ability as well as temperament is key. The most memorable incident for us was seeing the look of pride and satisfaction on the faces of our team when they saw the final product they worked on in their hand. Seeing that reaction and the confidence they get is always so satisfying.
How do you see the company changing in two years, and how do you see yourself creating that change?
We believe the company will grow in 2 dimensions – new products/brands and new channels/geographies. This growth will need to be accompanied by growth in the organization, and we will look to hire more specialized talent in brand, product management, marketing, and design. We will also need more capital (debt and equity) to fund our growth.
As founders, our role is to find the right growth opportunities and build the organization to effectively and efficiently capitalize on them. We often need to look 6-12 months down the line and plant seeds now because often things like hiring, fundraising, and new products can take a long time to come to fruition.
Where is your leadership going? What benefits do your clients get from your company in this competitive world?
As leaders, we see ourselves moving from contributors who would do everything from the supply chain, design, marketing, and branding to higher-order work such as drawing up playbooks, institutionalizing processes, hiring, and finding growth. Soon, when we have a great team in place, we believe we shall move away from process setting to strategy and partnerships.
As the world gets competitive, moats are very important. Broadly, our moats are content, user reviews, and word of mouth. However, for each brand, we think hard about the moats we can build that are more specific. For BetterClub, for example, we have started offering free yoga, nutrition, and physical training sessions with experts when you buy any product. We believe this value-added moat will only strengthen as we add more experts and grow customers.
What are the services/solutions or products offered by your company as par with the current industry standards? Tell us something about your upcoming products or services.
We offer products in multiple categories through our brands. BetterClub, our brand catering to fitness, beauty, nutrition, and mental health, provides best-in-class products such as yoga mats, water bottles, jade rollers, volcanic rollers, performance sports socks, yoga socks, folding mats, sports shorts and more.
Universe / Mapabliss are our brands for smart and safe products for mothers and children all the way from pre-pregnancy to 5 years of age.
We offer products such as breastfeeding pillows, maternity pillows, baby diaper bags, stools, walkers and more. Each product is designed to be safe as well as smart. We feel parents need a lot more from the products they use in the early years of having a child, and we resolved to make smarter products that make their life easier and safer. Our third brand, Bloom.Stores is a bamboo products brand that offers items such as bamboo lap desks, bamboo glass water bottles, bamboo boxes and so forth. As nature lovers, we love the feel of bamboo ourselves, and many customers are interested in moving towards a more nature-friendly lifestyle.
We are currently working on our line of men’s apparel (called Made-Man) and products in the Art Supplies and Senior Care spaces.
Our products are self-designed, and many are bestsellers on Amazon or Noon. We also sell on our brand websites.
Connect with Millind Bansia and Daivik Raval on LinkedIn.