We have seen food and beverage brands enter workplaces, embedding their products in canteens or setting up kiosks. We have seen fitness brands invade office environs. Now, personal care brands want you to take a break from work for a styling and grooming session at the office.

Lifestyle brand The Man Company (TMC), a personal grooming products start-up aimed at men, has been holding experiential sessions at co-working spaces like Wework, Innov8 and CoWrks.

Founder & MD Hitesh Dhingra says the plan is to extend the TMC Experience Zone to corporates. “The objective is to create awareness about the brand.” The experiment at co-working places worked, he says, as the users of these spaces are the right TG (target group) for The Man Company, which is aimed at 25-35-year-olds predominantly.

Dhingra, who started his entrepreneurial journey with advertising network Tyroo (bought by Yahoo) and then online retailer Let’s Buy (acquired by Flipkart for around ₹100 crore) changed tack when he invested in dating app Truly Madly. At The Man Company, which started out selling grooming products online, he says his e-commerce experience complemented the other co-founder Parvesh Bareja’s knowledge of the packaging industry. Bareja is director at Helios Packaging, which provides packaging solutions to perfume brands.

The Eureka moment

“Three years ago, when we started, there were no head-to-toe brands aimed at men,” says Dhingra. Perhaps The Man Company was also fortunate to have launched at the right time when beards had just started becoming in vogue.

“Interestingly for us, when we launched, the beard grooming category had no products. We were one of the pioneers in that space,” he says, talking about their beard oil. TMC went on to launch beard washes and beard waxes. “Most hairstyling products have petroleum jelly, not suitable for beards. We believe that skin on the face is a lot more sensitive and realised that beard requires specific products,” he says.

But as it happened, people would come in to buy beard care products and end up buying other stuff as well. At that time TMC had a bath and body range as well, including a soap bar containing activated charcoal. “We found that the charcoal soap was getting 90 per cent of sales,” says Dhingra.

That was a Eureka moment and six more products with activated charcoal were launched. “It is now our hero product,” says Dhingra. Today, TMC has close to 70 products and works with eight manufacturers, including ones in Canada and France. A lot of in-house R&D and hard work goes into the formulations, says Dhingra.

Primarily an e-commerce brand, bootstrapped with ₹1.5 crore, TMC is now slowly growing offline as well. With Emami acquiring a stake in the company, the funds are available to scale offline. “Last year, we started exploring partnerships with premium salons in NCR and Bangalore,” says Dhingra. Today, its reach has extended to 350 salons. In addition, a shop-in-shop has been created at Terminal 2 in Delhi airport.

An experiential lounge has also been set up where premium customers are invited to grab a drink and groom themselves. “We have partnered with Bira and serve beer on the house,” says Dhingra.

Tipping point

The male grooming market in India is currently estimated to be around ₹5,000 crore but is witnessing explosive growth. Brand consultant Giraj Sharma feels it is at tipping point and could become very big soon. “Young men today are very conscious of trends, willing to experiment with products and new looks, whereas earlier the attempt was just to look neat and clean,” he says. Nielsen research pegs the rise in demand for male grooming products purely because men perceive it will help them climb the corporate ladder faster. Beardo, Ustraa, The Bombay Shaving Company, Let’s Shave, Singh Styled (aimed at Sikhs) are all start-ups that have come up in the male grooming category.

Ask Dhingra how a start-up brand can compete against an established personal care company like HUL or ITC, and he says the major difference is that TMC is talking to customers directly and acting on the feedback immediately to work and develop new products. In 2018, he says, TMC shipped products to more than 600 districts across 4,500 pincodes.

“We discovered that interest in male grooming products is not just a metro phenomenon but places like Lucknow, Indore and cities in Kerala were contributing highly to sales; 70 per cent orders came from tier 2 and 3 cities.” Even more surprising, he says, is that users were flaunting the products on Instagram. “We had assumed men won’t share pictures — but that myth was broken,” he says. Marketing spends, he says, have been kept low, investing more in social media. In 2017-18, TMC clocked ₹13 crore, but expects to grow to ₹46 crore this year, riding on the growth in its salon network.

Well, given the hot growth forecast for the male grooming category as a whole — a Nielsen report forecasts a CAGR of 45 per cent in the next three years — look out for better groomed colleagues and friends in the days ahead.

comment COMMENT NOW