[Stoves] News 7 September 2016: Biolite CEO in Harvard Business Review

[Nikhil Desai]

https://hbr.org/2016/09/how-one-startup-developed-a-sales-model-that-works-in-emerging-markets

How One Startup Developed a Sales Model That Works in Emerging Markets,
Jonathan Cedar, HBR online 7 September 2016

Good thing he doesn't talk about EPA/ISO or premature mortality, killing by
assumptions.

Interesting lessons.

I have a memory from January 2012, visit to a medium-sized town of Chhota
Udaipur in eastern Gujarat, India. I copy below an e-mail I had sent out to
friends then, with three pictures attached.

What sells in Peoria - or Washington, DC - doesn't necessarily sell in
Pandharpur.

At least, Biolite has shown that there are lessons to be learned out there
among the people, not in labs under WBT protocol or in IHME computers
cooking up deaths.

N
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About three months ago I spent a day in eastern Gujarat - a village called
Virpur and a town called Chhota Udepur.

My first time. In the Chhota Udepur market, I found a "stove shop"; it was
selling LPG stoves with a large single burner for the
commercial/institutional customers. I went in the shop and talked to the
owners. The old man has been selling and repairing kerosene stoves and
lamps for some 40 years. Pictures a, b, and e show he still has kerosene
lamps (electricity is fairly extensive and the supplies are reliable, so
kerosene is as backup or for farm use, or for poorest people with
low-quality home or no home) and also sells metal wood and charcoal stoves.
The colorful small cylinders are for pressurized kerosene stoves.

I am learning Gujarat is unusual - my village of some 3-4,000 people back
in 1940 used to have coal and charcoal, kerosene came in the 1950s and LPG
in the 1970s. But, apart from the demand side (affordability, readiness to
change), the existence of delivery chains such as these also played a great
role. For towns like Chhota Udepur, LPG stoves from LPG franchisees started
in the 1980s and the 1990s, but even then it was up to this small stove
shop to innovate and make stoves for the commercial, institutional market
(and repair the household LPG stoves cheaply).

After talking to the shop-keeper, I walked across to a tea-seller on a
bicycle cart. He had an LPG bottle and a stove that sounded (loud hissing)
like the kerosene pressure stove (Primus in my childhood). I was puzzled.
This wasn't the ring burner with holes all around that is usual with LPG
stoves small and large. The man showed me the burner - looked like a pipe,
about an inch wide, straight up. He had a pilot light, and regulated gas
flow with a knob. He didn't have to light the burner, the gas flow was
fast, and he could heat up his aluminum kettle where he kept tea ready,
serve me a cup, and turn the stove off.

How many "improved", "advanced", "fortified" - or let's say "modern",
"gas-like" - wood stoves will reach such shops and such users, if not in
Gujarat (which has a lot of wood/dung use in villages) then other parts of
India and elsewhere in the world?

I could fantasize that tomorrow's teenagers - new wives too, since many
girls are married before they are 18 - can be marketed to by use of mobile
phones and that shops like these are a relic of the past, would keep
serving the current generations till they die out.

Still, I think the GACCis should go live in villages for a while.
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