It begins, as these stories often do, with a departure. In 1892, a young Narandas Desai travelled from Gujarat to South Africa and spent years in the tea trade there, coming under the influence of Mahatma Gandhi along the way. As racial discrimination hardened and political pressure grew, he made the only decision left to a man who still wanted to build something: he came home. In 1915, he returned to India with his family and little else, and by 1919 had opened Gujarat Tea Depot Co. in Ahmedabad, selling honest, affordable tea to the city’s textile mill workers. “That journey of rebuilding shaped the character of the brand in a very fundamental way,” says Paras Desai, Executive Director of Wagh Bakri Tea Group. “Wagh Bakri was built not only on entrepreneurship, but also on trust, relationships, and the belief that adversity can be transformed into opportunity.”
The name that followed carried its own philosophy. Wagh Bakri—tiger and goat—pictures two natural enemies sharing a cup together. “The image reflects the belief that tea has the ability to bring people together across social differences—regardless of status, background, or hierarchy,” Paras Desai explains, tracing the idea directly to Gandhi and to his great-grandfather’s own experience of discrimination in South Africa. Tea, in India, has always had this odd democratic power—it doesn’t much care whether it’s poured at a roadside stall or in a living room—and the Desai family built a company on the wager that this was worth protecting.
For decades, protecting it meant staying close to home. Wagh Bakri was Ahmedabad’s tea, long before it thought of itself as India’s, shaped by the city’s textile-mill culture and its sense of community. It took the 1985 Ahmedabad riots—and the discovery that packaged tea could match the quality of loose tea from the neighbourhood shop—to nudge the brand into Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, with Maharashtra following once a uniform VAT regime made interstate expansion easier. By 1992, Wagh Bakri had begun its first overseas push; today it sells across more than 40 countries, without ever quite letting go of Ahmedabad.
The marketing followed the same instinct: sell the relationship, not just the tea. In 2008, a nationwide campaign built around stronger bonds accompanied the brand’s first serious push into the southern states, even as Tata Tea and Hindustan Unilever held the lead in a category worth roughly ₹5,000 crore. By 2011, Wagh Bakri had signed actress Sakshi Tanwar as its face, backed by a ₹40-crore marketing spend and its first tea lounge, in Delhi. 2015 brought a long-format film built around the line ‘Rishton Ki Garmahat’—the warmth of relationships—which won Best Ad Film at the Dada Saheb Phalke Awards. A year later, Mili Tea launched behind #PehliMulakat, with Tanwar recast as a local shopkeeper coaxing customers to simply taste the tea first. By 2018, the brand was riding the ‘Rishton Ka Hi Fever’ theme through #HiNahiChaiPilao, a film built around a joint family split between its older and younger selves.
Nothing, though, was built quite like the campaign for the company’s hundredth year. In 2020, Wagh Bakri marked its centenary with a film built from over a hundred photographs of two cups of tea side by side, an anthem carrying its long-standing line ‘Hamesha Rishtey Banaye’—always building relationships—and a ‘Timeless Calendar’ suggesting the next hundred years would look much like the last. A 2022 push into digital marketing built a voice around what the brand calls its three T’s—trust, tradition and taste—while this year’s campaign, ‘Itti Si Wagh Bakri, Itti Kadak Swaad-bhari’, took aim at a different habit altogether: the belief that more tea leaves make a stronger cup, arguing instead that quality never needed the extra spoon.
It is, when you step back from the campaigns and the crore-figures, a fairly simple thing that Wagh Bakri has been saying for over a hundred years: that quality doesn’t need to shout, and that people who share very little else can still share a cup of tea. “Enduring businesses are built not only on quality products,” Paras Desai says, “but also on values, trust, and the ability to connect genuinely with people from every walk of life.” A tiger and a goat agreed on that, apparently, a long time before the rest of the market did.
