Four partners, an energy drink and a home-made aam panna.

Paper Boat is a brand of traditional Indian drinks made by Hector Beverages, a company based in Bengaluru. Hector was founded in 2009 by Neeraj Kakkar, Neeraj Biyani, Suhas Misra and James Nuttall, Mint reported in 2016. Three of the four had been colleagues at Coca-Cola in India; Kakkar and Biyani both studied at the Management Development Institute in Gurgaon, and Nuttall, an American, had studied with Kakkar at the Wharton School. The company’s first product was a protein drink, Frissia, Forbes India reported, followed in 2011 by an energy drink, Tzinga.

The idea for Paper Boat came over office lunches. Kakkar told Mint that after about a year of selling Tzinga the partners realised they most wanted to drink the aam panna that came with Misra’s home-made lunch each summer, and that in 2012, while the company was still in Gurgaon, they first began to think about launching traditional drinks. By the time they were ready, the green-mango season was over, so Paper Boat launched in 2013 with aamras and jaljeera instead, test-marketed in Bengaluru so as not to distract the northern sales team busy with Tzinga. After six to eight months, with sales picking up, it went north. English Wikipedia gives two launch months for 2013, March and August, citing different sources.

Misra left in 2014 and Nuttall in 2015, according to Forbes India, leaving Kakkar, as chief executive, and Biyani, as chief operating officer, at the helm; Mint reported that the departing partners had sold their shares to the remaining two. In 2016 the company worked from a bungalow called Finchley Castle in Whitefield, Bengaluru, its walls covered in bright colours and graffiti, the paper reported.

Elephant Design, a pouch and “alive and authentic.”

Paper Boat’s name, design and packaging came out of a collaboration with the strategic design and brand consultancy Elephant Design, Mint reported in 2016. The consultancy proposed three names — “Good Ol’,” “Lost and Found” and “Paper Boat” — and the founders chose the last, with the tagline “Drinks and Memories.” The name “instantly connects you to your childhood,” Biyani told the paper, because children everywhere make paper boats. Kakkar said the instruction to the agency was two words, “alive and authentic”: alive meaning modern, contemporary, fashionable and cool, and authentic meaning natural and traditional. “While the packaging is alive in terms of colour and design, the recipes are authentic,” he said.

The pack was a single-serve, stand-up flexible pouch, the Doypack. The company’s first plant, at Manesar near Gurgaon, was set up in 2010, Business Standard reported, and at the start it filled 80 Doypacks a minute; a second plant at Mysuru, in Karnataka, came up in 2015, and by 2016 the two together made 400 a minute, Mint reported. Larger cartons followed: 500 ml Tetra Prisma Aseptic packs in 2016, the trade site afaqs! reported, replaced in 2017 by one-litre cartons, Indiaretailing reported.

The range has stayed close to home recipes. After aamras and jaljeera came aam panna, jamun kala khatta, anar and chilli guava, and in 2016 the brand added festival drinks: thandai for Holi, panakam for Ram Navami and sherbet-e-khaas for Ramadan. English Wikipedia dates the brand’s first food, a peanut chikki, to 2016; it was Fairtrade-certified, made with groundnuts bought directly from a farmers’ collective near Rajkot in Gujarat, The Economic Times reported in 2017.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drink names from India: Thums Up, Limca, Frooti, Paper Boat, Rasna, Bisleri and Maaza. Indian drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Gulzar, Malgudi Days and books in the box.

Paper Boat built its following online before it advertised widely; it turned to mainstream advertising in 2015, making its television commercials with Lowe Lintas, Mint reported. Those commercials were set to an adaptation of the music from Malgudi Days, the television series based on R. K. Narayan’s stories, and the debut campaign was written and narrated by the poet and lyricist Gulzar, with a later one written by the lyricist Swanand Kirkire, the marketing site Lighthouse Insights reported in 2015. Short films followed, among them Rizwan – Keeper of the Gates of Heaven, made by the boutique agency Humour Me. The brand has also published books: reprints of Three Men in a Boat and The Jungle Book given away in gift boxes, and, in 2017, Half Pants Full Pants, Anand Suspi’s stories of growing up in Shimoga, Scroll.in reported.

Hector Beverages has been backed by outside investors since 2011, when it raised money from Catamaran, the investment firm of Infosys founder N. R. Narayana Murthy, and from Footprint Ventures, Mint reported. Sequoia Capital, whose India business now operates as Peak XV Partners, led a round in 2013, and Sofina and Hillhouse Capital led another in 2015. In August 2022 Mint reported that Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC was set to invest in the company. The brand’s own website still carries the “Drinks and Memories” line under a Hector Beverages copyright.

For a design guide, Paper Boat shows how a name, a pouch and a few lines of poetry can turn old home recipes into a modern brand. Compare Frooti, the mango drink in a green carton, and Haldiram’s, another brand built on traditional Indian recipes. For this guide we use a monsoon blue, an aam yellow and a paper white with a hand-drawn sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Paper Boat’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.