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Bombay Shaving Co., a New Delhi-based men’s grooming startup has raised $600K in an angel funding round from 25+ investors. The investment was led by former Vice Chairman of TCS and advisor to the Prime Minister Subramanian Ramadorai and McKinsey India MD Mr. Noshir Kaka.
11 senior partners from McKinsey, six current and former CEOs, and eight VC professionals also participated in their personal capacity. The raised funds will be used to extend product lines and categories.
S Ramadorai said in an official statement, “The team has developed a very high quality shaving system. It’s not easy to get the razor technology right. Anyone can import a razor and sell it. But to design it takes a lot of time, effort and expertise. This is their differentiation and entry point. I have tremendous confidence in them having seen their speed of execution and detail orientation.”
The company was founded in October 2015 and was launched in May 2016 by Shantanu Deshpande, Raunak Munot, Deepu Panicker, and Rohit Jaiswal. It is a private label online company, designing and selling high quality shaving products under its brand name. The founders are basically trying to get into men’s grooming as a category to build an FMCG company which is Internet-first.
A user can find complete range of shaving products on the portal. They can also choose for frequency refills and can schedule for subscriptions service as per their choice. It also provides auto debit facility from Paytm wallet of users (after a pre-notification), to avoid re-login every time for the frequent orders. Statistically, there are only two other companies in India which provide this facility, BookMyShow and Uber.
“We have almost 45 partners who work with us to design our products. We control every element of the value chain – be it industrial design, packaging, fragrance or raw material. We are deeply embedded in the product creation process and own the copyright to the products. Since these are not traded products, it helps us to get good margins with the right quality.” said Rohit.
Within the last two months, it claims to have attained more than 1500 orders with an average ticket size of INR 3000. As told to Inc42 by Shantanu, the company is growing 30% M-o-M, with zero return percentage. The traction mainly comes from cities such as Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Chennai. Interestingly, 30% of the user base comprises of women and the average user age is between 18 to 65.
“With this funding, we aim to disrupt the current men’s grooming market pegged at $1.5 Bn. We believe this market could reach up to $10-12 Bn in the next five years. Competition will thus create the market – more the number of players, more the market is created,” said Shantanu.
Currently, men’s grooming comes under flagship portals of Flipkart, Amazon India, Purplle and others, where typically products are sold on the platform. Although, there are a few players like The Man Company and Ustaraa which deal exclusively with men’s grooming and offer products as well as services.
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