 "Radha Agrawal makes Gita Garlic acceptable")
“For the first 10 years of my entrepreneurial career, my father would tell me: Radha it’s not too late to go to medical school. He always wanted me to opt for something safe like medicine or law,” Indian-origin social entrepreneur Radha Agrawal says over Skype from her office in New York. That’s a sentiment countless Indian parents would identify with. Fortunately, Agrawal, named one of 20 “millennials on a mission” by Forbes last year, did not heed that advice and went on to start a series of ventures, including a nutrition education company, Super Sprowtz, which has caught the attention of First Lady Michelle Obama. Agrawal’s latest is Daybreaker, a by-invitation early morning dance party (that’s right, early morning) where you dance up a storm before heading to work, without the haze of alcohol, and which seems to have caught the fancy of even a blasé city like New York, according to The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other publications.
Already in San Francisco, Daybreaker is now looking to launch in eight more cities across the globe, including Mumbai and Delhi, for which talks are on. “It all started when one of my best friends, Matt Brimer, and I were eating falafel around 4 am after a night of clubbing. We started talking about how there had to be a better way to dance and have a great time without having to get back home kind of drunk, and not feeling very good,” she says. That “way” turned out to be an early morning, alcohol-free dance-a-thon held on a weekday. “The whole idea is that you don’t need alcohol to break down barriers, to dance and to feel comfortable in your own skin,” she says. She speaks from experience: “I ended up meeting my boyfriend at a Daybreaker event! I saw him on the dance floor and neither of us felt shy about talking to each other because we were both dancing.”
For the first party in December, 200 of their close friends turned up — Agrawal says as incredible as it might sound, she has 40 best friends in New York, having lived there for 12 years. This ballooned to 800 guests at one one of their last, held on a triple-decker yacht which went around New York at 6.30 am on a Wednesday.
What occupies most of Agrawal’s time and “her heart and soul”, though, is Super Sprowtz, which she founded to address the growing threat of childhood obesity in the US, where one in three children is reported to be obese. Through the use of storytelling, multimedia aids and characters with names like Brian Broccoli (there’s even a Gita Garlic, named after Agrawal’s aunt), the idea was to convince children that eating vegetables is “cool”. “We are the Sesame Street or Galli Galli Sim Sim of nutrition education, and we are the only children’s brand looking at the issue in this way,” she says. Launched in 2011, the company’s work came to the attention of the US First Lady, a vocal advocate for healthy eating, who did not hesitate to shake a leg with the vegetable characters for a Super Sprowtz video.
A study conducted by Cornell University researchers covering 10,000 students in schools across New York has found that there was a 250 per cent increase in children eating vegetables when Super Sprowtz characters and branding were involved, she says. “The study will be released in fall this year and it should really help put us on the international map as a programme that works.” Talks are already under way with Dubai, which has the second most overweight population in the world, to expand there and pilots have been conducted.
The entrepreneur says she maintains close ties with India, visiting once every two years. “I even went to Hindi school in Canada for 10 years and can read and write,” she says, adding for good measure, “Main Hindi thoda thoda bolti hoon (I can speak a bit of Hindi).” More than anything else, it was being the daughter of immigrants that has shaped her. “My father came to the US with $5 in his pocket which he used to buy a jacket from the Salvation Army. And though my mother came from a very wealthy family in Tokyo, she had to renounce all that to marry my father,” she says. “Coming from such disparate backgrounds (her grandparents ran a sari shop in Varanasi), there were a lot of challenges. To be a witness to that but also to have them shield us from so much of their hardship really gives me the motivation to make them proud.”
Her third social enterprise is perhaps the one which would find the most resonance in India. Launched with her twin sister and their friend, Thinx is a leak-proof underwear they have developed for women to wear during their period, instead of a sanitary napkin or tampon. Each Thinx panty that is bought funds seven reusable sanitary napkins for girls in Uganda, for which the sisters have partnered with non-profit AFRIpads. “Millions of girls in developing countries are either missing school or dropping out because of something as simple as their period and that creates a huge imbalance. We’ve already helped around 1,500 girls in Uganda but I’m very motivated to go to India next, and we are already in talks with potential partners,” she says. Thinx, the founders hope, will act as a vehicle to end the silence around menstruation and “break the taboo”, as the company slogan terms it.
With such diverse achievements and ventures (and more in the pipeline though she refuses to go into details) under her belt, did her father finally come around to her career choice? “Yes, when we raised $5 million for Super Sprowtz through private investors. He figured that if people have enough faith in my ideas to invest that kind of money in it, he should too.”
Already in San Francisco, Daybreaker is now looking to launch in eight more cities across the globe, including Mumbai and Delhi, for which talks are on. “It all started when one of my best friends, Matt Brimer, and I were eating falafel around 4 am after a night of clubbing. We started talking about how there had to be a better way to dance and have a great time without having to get back home kind of drunk, and not feeling very good,” she says. That “way” turned out to be an early morning, alcohol-free dance-a-thon held on a weekday. “The whole idea is that you don’t need alcohol to break down barriers, to dance and to feel comfortable in your own skin,” she says. She speaks from experience: “I ended up meeting my boyfriend at a Daybreaker event! I saw him on the dance floor and neither of us felt shy about talking to each other because we were both dancing.”
For the first party in December, 200 of their close friends turned up — Agrawal says as incredible as it might sound, she has 40 best friends in New York, having lived there for 12 years. This ballooned to 800 guests at one one of their last, held on a triple-decker yacht which went around New York at 6.30 am on a Wednesday.
Agrawal (right) partnered her twin, Miki, to launch a chain of organic, gluten-free pizza restaurants, which gave her the idea to launch Super Sprowtz
There are other “take back the morning” parties, such as Morning Gloryville, which originated in London and is set to debut in India on Monday, in Bangalore. But Agrawal prefers to call Daybreaker a “community movement,” because she feels it gives people a place where they feel they belong. Their last party for 500, she says, ended with a 200-person group hug. “I had people coming up to me afterwards bursting into tears and telling me they’ve been looking for this kind of community all their lives. For me, that was very exciting,” says the vivacious 35-year-old. With only her parents, twin sister Miki, also a social entrepreneur, and elder sister Yuri, a brain surgeon, in this part of the world, she says the Daybreaker community also feels like extended family for her. While Daybreaker may not have been started as a business venture, sponsorships and ticketing sales ($25 in New York) have been sufficient to hire a team and even support independent artistes who perform at the events.What occupies most of Agrawal’s time and “her heart and soul”, though, is Super Sprowtz, which she founded to address the growing threat of childhood obesity in the US, where one in three children is reported to be obese. Through the use of storytelling, multimedia aids and characters with names like Brian Broccoli (there’s even a Gita Garlic, named after Agrawal’s aunt), the idea was to convince children that eating vegetables is “cool”. “We are the Sesame Street or Galli Galli Sim Sim of nutrition education, and we are the only children’s brand looking at the issue in this way,” she says. Launched in 2011, the company’s work came to the attention of the US First Lady, a vocal advocate for healthy eating, who did not hesitate to shake a leg with the vegetable characters for a Super Sprowtz video.
A study conducted by Cornell University researchers covering 10,000 students in schools across New York has found that there was a 250 per cent increase in children eating vegetables when Super Sprowtz characters and branding were involved, she says. “The study will be released in fall this year and it should really help put us on the international map as a programme that works.” Talks are already under way with Dubai, which has the second most overweight population in the world, to expand there and pilots have been conducted.
Agrawal’s latest venture is Daybreaker, a by-invitation early morning alcohol-free dance party before heading to work
Agrawal traces the origin of her nutrition education company to her childhood, when she grew up eating sushi and curry in Montreal (her mother is Japanese). “Super Sprowtz is my way of sharing the excitement of new kinds of food and culinary adventure and it’s a company that combines the arts, through storytelling, with business and food,” says the Cornell graduate who majored in communications and even spent a year with an investment bank on Wall Street earning a six-figure salary just so that she could prove to her father that she could do it. “But I was in New York when 9/11 happened and that’s when I realised life is way too short and that we must pursue our passions. And I didn’t want to do investment banking anymore — I f***ing hated it!” She partnered with Miki in launching a chain of organic, gluten-free pizza restaurants in New York and Las Vegas, which was also where she began noticing how children were ignoring vegetables, thus laying the foundation for Super Sprowtz.The entrepreneur says she maintains close ties with India, visiting once every two years. “I even went to Hindi school in Canada for 10 years and can read and write,” she says, adding for good measure, “Main Hindi thoda thoda bolti hoon (I can speak a bit of Hindi).” More than anything else, it was being the daughter of immigrants that has shaped her. “My father came to the US with $5 in his pocket which he used to buy a jacket from the Salvation Army. And though my mother came from a very wealthy family in Tokyo, she had to renounce all that to marry my father,” she says. “Coming from such disparate backgrounds (her grandparents ran a sari shop in Varanasi), there were a lot of challenges. To be a witness to that but also to have them shield us from so much of their hardship really gives me the motivation to make them proud.”
Her third social enterprise is perhaps the one which would find the most resonance in India. Launched with her twin sister and their friend, Thinx is a leak-proof underwear they have developed for women to wear during their period, instead of a sanitary napkin or tampon. Each Thinx panty that is bought funds seven reusable sanitary napkins for girls in Uganda, for which the sisters have partnered with non-profit AFRIpads. “Millions of girls in developing countries are either missing school or dropping out because of something as simple as their period and that creates a huge imbalance. We’ve already helped around 1,500 girls in Uganda but I’m very motivated to go to India next, and we are already in talks with potential partners,” she says. Thinx, the founders hope, will act as a vehicle to end the silence around menstruation and “break the taboo”, as the company slogan terms it.
With such diverse achievements and ventures (and more in the pipeline though she refuses to go into details) under her belt, did her father finally come around to her career choice? “Yes, when we raised $5 million for Super Sprowtz through private investors. He figured that if people have enough faith in my ideas to invest that kind of money in it, he should too.”