What inspired you to take on the challenge of selling 450 liters of Mango Lassi in Stockholm, especially given your busy professional lives?
In 2023 we were at the Namaste Stockholm festival, it’s the one day we as Indians in Stockholm get to experience food, drinks, and culture from home in one evening.
We saw people pour so much passion to get these stalls going along with their love for food, this is where we imagined being part of the same crowd and thought we too had something to offer. Taking evenings and weekends out from our schedule, we managed to take the necessary steps in ideating, testing, and finally delivering on the product.
All of us were clear on the fact that this was not about making money, it was a labor of love and the experience of bringing culture to the event, organizing this from start to finish. That said, it was important for us to keep it simple, as this was our first dip into the industry.
Why lassi? What’s significant?
How did you manage the planning and execution of this event alongside your regular jobs?
We kept it simple, a single product that will be universally known and easy to recognize, something that was available in Indian restaurants already so we didn’t find ourselves explaining what the product was, the planning started 4 months before the event.
Getting the brand right, the food grade quality that we needed to deliver and taste that we would not compromise on, ultimately bringing the most authentic lassi experience to Stockholm.
We are a great mix of people who found what we are individually good at and how we could each take a small part of the project and contribute in our own ways.
LOL team preparations
What were some of the key steps in your preparation?
Market research
- Understand the potential footfall based on 2023 statistics (Over 25k visited the event ‘Namaste Stockholm’)
- User preference - Lactose free since that was missing in 2023 and there was a huge demand for it.
- Product development
- Rigorous testing of various recipes
- Testing on family and friends
- Procuring quality ingredients (Mango Pulp, High protein Greek yogurt, cardamom, and a pinch of sugar)
Food licenses
- We collaborated with a kitchen to get us the highest quality of lassi.
Pricing
- We chose premium pricing (25% more than most competitors) since we believed it was something that we would make for ourselves, choosing quality and our strategy of focusing on just one product.
Branding
- We chose a fun and catchy brand name to appeal to all sorts of audiences.
- LOL - Lassi Out Loud, that’s a catchy name!
Logistics
- We had friends to support us all along the way! Truly without them we wouldn’t have been able to get as far as we did. We kept the model lean and simple was our motto. We even had one of our friends transport more than half a ton of lassi at 7 am to deliver at the event.
What were the biggest challenges you faced during this venture, and how did you overcome them?
Storage and transport were our biggest challenges since we handled 450l of Lassi. We checked with a few Pizza places in Liljeholmen, Stockholm on what options we had to carry such high volumes of liquid, and based on that we secured a few large food-grade containers and our friend Rahul Yadav helped us transport those containers from the Kitchen to the event location.
One challenge we faced during the day was people reading ‘Lactose free’ as just free, people picked up a glass and walked away, it’s an awkward feeling if we should interfere and say something, after the 3rd glass was gone we had to roll up our sleeves and get talking that it’s not actually free.
Around lunch all the way until 4 pm, we were on constant sale, we couldn’t pour a glass faster than they were being bought out, a truly tiring experience but always had a smile on us since we saw the large container we brought the day of were half empty, we had sold out half our entire stock by 2 pm. Even skipping lunch just for us to operate, we were 3 in the tent pouring the glasses and there was no room for us to be 2. Product imagery was a difficult one too, we didn’t really have studio or the expertise in the group to pull it through, for which we turned to AI generated imagery, simply said it worked really well in marketing.
Can you describe the atmosphere and customer reactions during the hour of selling?
How did it feel to see such a positive response? Electric! Something that we cannot forget. The perspective of standing behind a stall for the first time made us feel what it takes to sell, to attract customers and keep them interested. We offered samples to test and 100% of people who tasted our product irrespective of age or where they came from we got people queuing and drooling, coming back for more. People, especially tourists, wanted to pay us in multiple currencies when Swish was not an option.
There were some customers who came for the 4th time. A humbling experience to say the least.
Elder people and Swish onboarding
LOL stand at the Namaste Festival
What do you think were the main factors that contributed to your success in selling out so quickly?
- A Single product to sell.
- The product name that was already in our brand ‘Lassi out Loud’.
- A fun graphic which attracted kids to the stall and the idea that it was called ‘LOL’ in short also played to our advantage throughout the day, we had parents coming up to us stating that their kids wanted to drink at ‘Lol’. Always brought a smile to us when we heard this and we heard this a lot.
- A team who really didn’t take no for an answer, since it was at several stages we faced a hard No from a distributor, or the kitchen we were collaborating with, or the amount/weight of lassi to carry from point A to B, it was demoralizing at several points, but we carried on.
- We had 1 price for the product, no variants, it was all lactose free even removing a ‘Lactose variant’ to keep the buying process simple. All our competitors had a whole menu to offer while we had just one thing to offer. It removed all the guesswork from the buying experience.
How has this experience impacted your perspective on entrepreneurship and pursuing passions outside of your career?
We have a newfound respect for founders and entrepreneurs who hustle daily to make their idea fly and gain recognition and traction for it.
It’s proper hard work, and not for someone who just sees this as a fun activity to do, one of our team members, Akash has done the entrepeurenal journey a few times earlier, and even to him this was an entirely new eye opening experience. We are truly humbled with the experience and thank Namaste Stockholm’s team for giving us the change to bring our best forward.
What advice would you give to other professionals who have a passion project but are hesitant to pursue it?
As cliché as this may sound, just do it! Jump into it with both feet and eyes wide open. We did it and we were surprised all along the way. It’s important to keep the goal in front of you, and always see a challenge as something someone else has figured out. If someone else can, so can you. We will carry this with us forward onto our next project.
There will be people who will doubt you along the way, learn to ignore and take energy from it to prove them wrong. We had people who doubted us, quoting we had to sell 1 lassi/30 seconds, we proved them wrong.
Lassi Out Loud Team
Do you see this as a one-time event, or are there plans for future ventures?
This is a great question, something we have been wondering ourselves. It’s tempting to one-up ourselves, to do it bigger and carry the brand that we thought to be as a fun one time thing. Let’s just say we have kept all of the gear from the event in case we might just do it.
Afterall, we were the most popular lassi brand at an event with 30k footfall :)
How can readers connect with you and follow your journey?
Linkedin is the best place to reach us, we don’t currently have an official brand page.
The Sweden Herald Newsdesk team extends heartfelt thanks to the LOL team for sharing their truly inspiring entrepreneurial journey! If you have a story like this to share, please contact us at [email protected]
