Small town wonders

Outlook Business's article on small town entrepreneurs had some interesting tidbits:

On the city’s Grand Trunk Road lies a nondescript, three-storied building that has the look of the office of a small software company in a metro. This is the headquarters of one of India’s largest FMCG companies. The group’s name, Rohit Surfactants, won’t ring a bell, but its flagship product will: the detergent, Ghari. At about Rs 1,400 crore last year, the Ghari brand ratchets up more revenues than all of Godrej consumer’s brands (including Cinthol) put together. It clocks more revenues than Reckitt Benckiser’s renowned Dettol brand in India. In the last four months alone, Ghari sold detergents worth over Rs 600 crore. To put that figure in perspective, FMCG giant Hindustan Unilever’s largest brand, Wheel, records annual sales of about Rs 2,000 crore. Rohit Surfactants claims to have a market share of over 40% in detergents in the populous states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.
“I used to try out new formulations for detergents at home,” explains 63-year-old Murlidhar, founder and Chairman of Ghari group, in chaste Hindi. Ghari’s transition from a homemade brand to a trans-state player was gradual. It did not go for the big-bang, wide-dispersion advertising strategy normally adopted by FMCG companies. It couldn’t afford to. So, like a true guerrilla warrior, it attacked the market town by town, mohalla by mohalla. Today, it has 3,000 distributors nationwide, 800 of them in UP alone. A small city like Kanpur has 25 dealers.


More here:http://business.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262143