For the Butterfly brand, it has been a five-decade long journey from just stainless steel cup to a ₹870 crore kitchen appliance company and a household name in southern India. Whether it is a stainless steel (SS) gas stove, wet grinder or table top wet grinder, Butterfly has been their first choice.

V Latha, a housewife in Chennai, swears by the Butterfly table top wet grinder. Her sister Usha in Kancheepuram has been using a Butterfly mixer grinder for over a decade. It is this strong brand loyalty and credibility that attracted Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals to acquire Chennai-based Butterfly Gandhimathi Appliances Ltd for a total consideration of ₹2,076.63 crore.

“Butterfly was able to establish credibility. It is this credibility that is being bought by Crompton,” said Harish Bijoor, a brand strategy expert and founder, Harish BijoorConsults. It is very difficult to build brands in the durable space in India. But, Butterfly has done a brilliant job overall in the last five decades, and remains a very hard-working brand at the grassroot level, he added.

Crompton’s Managing Director Shantanu Khosla says that the acquisition provides concrete support to our long-term vision of becoming a leading pan-India kitchen appliances player.

VM Lakshminarayanan, Chairman, Butterfly Gandhimathi, on the sale to Crompton, said, “as a 50-year-old family and home-grown business, we are proud of the growth story. Butterfly is a strong brand in South India, and this step will provide an opportunity for the Butterfly brand to achieve pan-India reach.”

A humble tumbler

Butterfly’s journey started in the 1950s when its founder chairman, the late V Murugesa Chettiar, hailing from a small town in Coimbatore district and from a family involved in the brassware business had his first product – a humble`tumbler’ (a cup used for drinking water/coffee etc) made out of stainless steel. In the early ‘70s, the cups were even smuggled into neighbouring countries, a company official told BusinessLine in August 2011.

15 products today

The brand Butterfly was born in 1986 with the launch of the SS pressure cooker. This was followed by SS LPG stoves at a time when stoves then were made from wrought iron carrying with it the hazards of toxic fumes for the consumers. The Indian Standards Organization raised the benchmark thermal efficiency of LPG stoves from 50 per cent to 68 per cent after Butterfly successfully demonstrated its quality standards, the company’s 2020-2021 annual report says.

Butterfly’s next major innovation was flasks in 1989 that could retain the heat for nearly 72 hours unlike conventional flasks that could retain heat for just 8 hours. The innovation continues, and today Butterfly has over 15 product categories and over 700 SKUs.

In 2003, Gandhimathi Appliances went to BIFR in 2003 and came out in 2008 following the settlement of loans to the tune of ₹40 crore raised from promoters' personal funds.

In March 2012, the company offered preferential issue to Reliance PE and raised ₹100 crore,

Butterfly grew at 21 per cent CAGR between FY17-21; ranked number one in the Stainless SS LPG Stoves and table top wet grinders. It is among the top three in domestic kitchen appliances and present in all the Indian states with an exclusive distributor.

Post the acquisition combined revenue would be around ₹5,670 crore with appliances contributing around 24 per cent of the revenue from the present 10 per cent. It will also consolidate the company’s position in the south, said Crompton in an investor presentation.

Butterfly may have changed hands but the brand will remain strong in the south, say brand experts.

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