The Neon Show Disrupting Indian Grooming ft. Shantanu Deshpande, Founder, Bombay Shaving Company
How often do you see an entrepreneur’s last employer putting equity in their idea?
Well, this is exactly what happened with the guest of our today’s episode, Shantanu Deshpande, Founder - Bombay Shaving Company.
In 2015, when Shantanu decided to dominate the men's grooming space and he was quitting his job at McKinsey, then his peer’s and seniors didn’t just allow him to leave but decided to back him up with an initial Seed funding.
Last year when the country went into lockdown, the company’s revenues increased by 3x. One of the interesting driving factors behind this was the women employees at the company.
Their perspective was very straightforward:
# Problem Statement: During the lockdown, there was a shortage of women's hair removal products and razors.
# Opportunity: They were working for a company, which made razors for a living.
# Solution: These women employees then decided to coordinate with the product designers, test the product on themselves, put in their inputs, and get their own women’s razor out in the market.
With this the Bombay Shaving Company, which earlier had 27% women customers buying their products for the men in their life (i.e. partners, father, brother) as a gifting option, now had 50% orders coming in from women with a major share of them buying women’s hair removal products.
During the podcast, Shantanu shares with us what other tailwinds he leveraged during last year’s lockdown, how he believes in enabling his investors to partially exit from the brand from time to time, and how he derives the best value from his large institutional investors.
Notes -
01:38 - Growing up in Florida (US) and moving back to India
06:50 - Leaving McKinsey & starting Bombay Shaving Company
09:18 - “The richest source of information is a conversation with people who are in it all the time.”
17:13 - Tailwinds which enabled 3x revenue post-lockdown in Mar’20
19:50 - Channel-wise revenue break-up
21:47 - Raising initial seed-round from McKinsey
23:30 - “My belief was always, that we should never raise money to buy revenues, we should always raise money to build a brand.”
26:24 - Core-target metrics since launch
30:02 - 3 Crucial things to winning customers early-on
33:07 - Enabling exits for early Angel investors
39:57 - “Having good organic traffic is a proxy for brand strength.”
44:32 - Deriving best value from financial investors