A splash of desi spirit and nostalgia: How Matinee Gin is hitting the right notes

Based in Goa, it is India’s first women-founded gin brand. Made with desi ingredients, it wants to be “your first and last drink of the day”.

Friday September 30, 2022 , 7 min Read

The word ‘matinee’ has a lot of nostalgia attached to it in India. Picture getting dressed up and getting in a long queue to catch the first show of your favourite star’s latest movie, armed with the traditional movie popcorn. Truly, grabbing a seat at a matinee show was a different ‘flex’ altogether.

This is the “Indianness” Lavanya Jayashankar and Anjali Shahi, founders of Goa-based Matinee Gin, were looking to imitate and evoke—but with your drink.

1796 people loved this story
Goa’s bev-aissance: How India’s party state became a gin capital

“Matinee felt like the perfect name– playing on India’s love for Bollywood, cinema, drama, and a bloody good show! Matinee is the first show of the day and we want Matinee Gin to be your first (and last) drink of the day,” says Lavanya in a conversation with YS Life.

In an already crowded gin market, the brand didn’t just want to be just another “Made in India” company. Launched in 2018, it wanted to embody the desi vibe at the heart of its product and experience.

“We wanted to create a truly local product. Our recipe is entirely formulated in India and our brand embraces India’s love for colour,” adds Lavanya.

A story of two gin-enthusiasts

They say, ‘A good friend listens to your adventures. A best friend makes them with you.’

And this holds true for Matinee Gin’s founders Anjali and Lavanya. Having met in 2003 during college, the two have been travelling and drinking together since. “All our holiday itineraries have revolved around a healthy amount of planning around food and beverages experiences—including road trips across France and holidays in Greece. We always shared a mutual love for alcohol and good food, from Amritsar to Athens, and from Mumbai to Paris. We have spent many years over gin and tonics,” Lavanya says.

Anjali, now 36, is an alum of INSEAD. She has prior experience in handling the finances of her family’s shipping business. Post her MBA, she spent four-years at Amazon, where she launched new businesses and products.

Lavanya, 37, grew between North and South India, and then spent 12 years abroad before coming back to India. She has 16 years of experience in advertising, branding, and strategy, working with brands across the globe, including the likes of Diageo, playing a role in the rebranding of Gordon’s gin. She had earlier founded Hyprlocl, a design-thinking firm that amassed clients ranging from Facebook and WhatsApp to Indian unicorns Swiggy and Ola, and heritage brands TATA and Godrej.

The idea of launching a gin brand came to Anjali while she was sipping her favourite G&T across European bars that listed more than 300 brands.

She saw a lucrative opportunity—launching an Indian gin at a time when there were no locally grown brands. She came home and discussed the idea with Lavanya, who was immediately excited. And there has been no looking back since.

“Working together was not planned but it felt like a natural evolution given our common interest in the product, mutual desire to create something fantastic, and our complementary skill sets,” says Lavanya.

The duo play to their strengths. While Lavanya drives the brand, Anjali leads the product. The founders have invested Rs 40 lakh each to establish and build the brand. They have also raised Rs 1.5 crore from angel investors and Anthill Ventures.

Distilling to perfection

Originated in England, the primary ingredients in gin are grain spirit and juniper berries. Many brands also tend to flavour the distilled drink by adding botanicals or herbs, spices, and fruity or floral flavours.

“A lot of the botanicals used in gin are familiar Indian spices—the likes of cardamom and cinnamon. We wanted to also introduce ingredients that international brands are yet to use,” Anjali says,

To set themselves apart, Lavanya and Anjali indulged in spice safaris to identify options with unique flavour profiles and visited the famous Lalbaug spice market in Mumbai to fulfil their search.

Their first compound gin recipe was made in Anjali’s living room by combining 42 different distillates using the spices and fruits the duo selected from Lalbaug, working with a mixologist from Soho House in London. They worked out a small 300 litre still, producing 50 cases of gin. The capacity limitation of the still helped them test the recipe out at a small scale in March 2021. After a couple of iterations and incorporating customer feedback, they finalised on the final list of ingredients.

Matinee Gin’s first full-scale batch was launched in December. It has four new ingredients– kagzi lime (a more fragrant but lesser known version of gondhoraj), zedoary (or white turmeric), nagkesar, and teppal (Goan peppercorn); along with the usual orange, cardamom, cinnamon, and juniper.

“The initial recipe had mango in it but we dropped it due to seasonality and storage challenges…We have also tempered other botanicals like nagkesar down, which was making the gin too spicy. We wanted to keep it light and fresh on the palate,” Lavanya explains.

Sustainability in a bottle

Most gin brands—including the homegrown ones—have embraced a sombre palette when it comes to branding and design.

But Matinee Gin wanted to add fun and vibrancy to a category that usually takes itself seriously. Indian artist Pratap Chalke is the brain behind the illustration on the brand’s bottles—a vibrant and colourful picture of two individuals. The idea was to embody the chemistry people share when they are drinking together, Anjali explained.

Pratap hand-drew the design before converting it into a printable design. In fact, Matinee Gin is one of the few premium brands that prints its label directly on the bottle doing away with the paper label. Additionally, they use lead-free paint, a first in India.

“The illustration cuts through the shelf clutter and is flaunt-able in your home bar,” Anjali adds.

Taking the sustainable route, the team sources most ingredients from Goan markets, with the exception of kagzi lime that is directly sourced from farmers in Bihar, juniper sourced from North India, and the spirit, sourced by a distillery in Punjab.

Gin-ing market

As of 2020, the global gin market was valued at $14.03 billion and is projected to reach $20.17 billion by 2028, Allied Market Research suggests. According to Coherent Market Insights, out of this, the Indian gin market will be worth $413.7 billion by the end of 2027.

Last year, Goa-based gin brand Greater Than doubled its sales from 2020, becoming the largest selling gin in the mass premium category, overtaking traditional giants including Bombay Sapphire and Gordon’s.

Besides this, other homegrown brands like Samsara, Gin Gin, Stranger & Sons, Jaisalmer Indian Craft Gin, Terai, Tickle Gin, and Pumori have been making it to the shelves of India’s top bars.

Matinee has strategically priced itself at Rs 1,650 in Goa to “reflect and respect the progression of the Indian consumer, and assure on liquid quality. Additionally, it has been priced at the ‘accessible premium’ to encourage experimentation,” Anjali explains.

For Anjali and Lavanya, having a woman-only founding team has been a double-edged sword.

There are advantages of being one of the few women in the alcobev industry but it sometimes gets lonely without a community of like-minded people with similar challenges—surviving sexist remarks and their capabilities being questioned.

Inside Matinee Gin, the company boasts of a women-friendly workplace with a focus on flexibility and representation of women at every level. It has also partnered with women-led businesses and going beyond the gender, often collaborating with Mr Bartender and the Crew, India’s first LGBTQIA+ team of bartenders.

So far, the brand has sold 710 cases (each containing 12 bottles) across Goa, and are about to launch the product in Karnataka. In fact, the founders want to take their product to international waters soon.

“Our ambition is to be a global drink of choice, and our journey starts with focusing on expansion within India for the next 12 to 18 months before foraying into key international markets. We are at the start of our journey of exploring new products—from flavour editions to new types of products. We are looking for the right space where our personal passions and numbers intersect,” Lavanya concludes.