In the land of roadside barbers, a startup wants men to spend big on a good shave

In the land of roadside barbers, a startup wants men to spend big on a good shave

In a country of roadside barber shops and ubiquitous Gillette razors, a former McKinsey associate has traveled to China and back to give Indian men a classy shave.

Bombay Shaving Company, started in August 2015 by Shantanu Deshpande (28), wants to sell razors, shaving gels and balms online in India’s Rs7,500 crore male grooming market. His competition includes multinational and homegrown behemoths including Gillette, Hindustan Unilever, Emami and Godrej.

It’s a tall order. But Deshpande, who spent some four years working with the country’s leading consumer goods companies in his consulting days, is convinced that more and more Indian men want to look good, and few brands are helping them do so. “They are on Tinder and matrimonial websites, and they are taking more selfies than ever and they need to look well groomed,” he explained.

So the Bombay Shaving Company has floated a nifty shaving kit that exclusively sold online and currently cost about Rs3,000. It includes a shaving cream, pre-shave scrub, balm, blades—which should together last around 60-70 shaves—and a razor and brush. The latter two are being pitched as a one time buy.

That’s not cheap, compared to Gillette’s razor, which priced anywhere between Rs 22 and Rs 500 or more, plus the additional costs of blades. Nonetheless, since it first started selling in July 2016, the company has picked up 1,350 subscribers online. In the next six months, Deshpande hopes to add 25,000 subscribers.

They’ve also managed to line up a solid group of investors. Last August, just after Deshpande quit McKinsey, two dozen individual investors backed him with seed funding of Rs4 crore.

Shaving off the monopoly

For years, Indian men were mostly ignored by consumer goods companies. Those days seem to be over.

In fact, male-grooming is one of the fastest growing consumer segments in India, Nielsen said in a research report in April 2015. The big drivers were the emergence of men’s fairness creams, sunscreens and beer shampoos by companies such as L’oreal, Emami and Marico.

The boom isn’t simply because Indian men want to appeal to the opposite sex anymore. Nielsen suggests that for men, “good grooming, they believe, is conducive to boosting self-confidence”.

Amid this boom, Bombay Shaving Company is looking close the gap between cheap brands and high-end products, especially for consumers in urban markets who are willing to pay more. “Yes, it is a premium brand,” said Deshpande, adding that his target consumer is a “discerning India male, who has an inclination for doing things right or being mindful in all his activities.”

Except there’s one problem: Gillette, owned by American multinational Proctor & Gamble, controls the Indian shaving market. “That’s a huge huge monopoly by one brand. We can enter the shaving market and be a second or third best,” said Deshpande.

The right razor

The idea of men’s online grooming brand isn’t entirely new.

With more men around the globe spending more time and money on looking better, new-age brands have emerged. Take for instance the Dollar Shave Club in the US, started in 2011, which recently got bought over by Unilever for $1 billion. In 2015, the American internet company clocked a turnover of $150 million selling low priced razors as an alternative to Gillette and Schick.

In India, however, building a similar male-grooming company isn’t easy.

One of the biggest challenges that Deshpande faced was finding the right razor. It’s especially problematic because Gillette itself manufacturers most of the razors that it sells in India. So Deshpande was forced to spend eight months finding the right razor, which he eventually chanced upon in China’s Guangzhou after posting a query on Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce website.

In a market dominated by mass-market products “niche brands or products like these can become popular but it is not to say that they will replace or become very dominant in the market,” reckoned Ankur Bisen who heads the retail and consumer products practice at consulting firm Technopak Advisors.

“So they will have a restrictive model or consumer base at last as they start out, but there is a market for consumers who are well-traveled and understand global trends who are willing to experiment,” added Bisen.

Deshpande understands the importance of being more accessible, “We will go down the value chain, not just yet. We want to build aspiration around the brand,” he added.

Bombay Shaving Company eventually plans to convert online sales to a large off-line business. Deshpande, who is ready for a series A, to secure a larger fund-raise post the seed capital, seems prepared to fight a long battle with large consumer goods companies.

All this for a well-groomed man.