1) In the year 1969, the son of a small farmer, Karsanbhai Patel, was trying to mix soda ash and a few ingredients to make a detergent.
2) One day he got the formula right and he started producing detergents in the 100 sq ft backyard of his home as an after-office business.
3) A father once lost his daughter in a car accident. Only a few people knew her when she was alive, but her father decided to immortalize her throughout the country, and he named the powder Nirma.
4) His success can be proved because you also know that girl and almost everyone reading this knows her.
5) During that time, the detergent business in India was dominated by Surf, manufactured by Hindustan Lever. But Surf was a premium product primarily sold in tier 1 cities.
6) Karsanbhai would cycle through the neighborhoods and sell his detergent at almost one-third of the price of Surf.
He even gave a money-back guarantee for every packet of Nirma he sold.
7) The new yellow powder was priced at ₹3.50/kg, at a time when HLL's Surf was priced at ₹13. Soon, there was a huge demand for Nirma in Ruppur, Patel's hometown.
8) Patel was able to sell about 15-20 packets a day on his way to the office on a bicycle, some 15 km away.
9) The good quality and affordable price made the product a big success and the customers found value in the product.
10) Nirma was a one-man army in the beginning as Patel did almost everything by himself.
11) Even though he was educated and had a government job, he didn’t feel hesitant to sell his product door to door. He eventually realized the need for a quality detergent targeted at the economic class and decided to expand his operations.
12) Karsanbhai was very much clear with his product’s market segmentation. He wanted to target the middle and lower-income segments.
13) Hence, in order to gain traction in the market, he made the price low without compromising on the quality.
14) While traditional companies followed a top-down approach, that is from expanding from big cities to rural areas, Nirma did the opposite and started from the rural areas, gradually expanding to urban customers.
15) In the 1980s, Nirma overtook Surf and was the largest selling detergent powder and detergent cake in India.
16) As part of its promotional strategy, Karsanbhai often appeared on television wearing just a loincloth to promote his brand without celebrity endorsement.
17) He also talked about Nirma's features during TV interviews wearing only the loincloth. This simple but effective approach helped establish Nirma as an iconic household name across India!
18) Nirma entered the export market in 1986 itself. The first country outside India to start importing it was Kenya, followed by Uganda and Zimbabwe. In 1987, Karsanbhai started selling Nirma in the USA via a network of Gujarati retailers.
19) By 1999, Nirma was a major consumer brand, offering a range of detergents, soaps, and personal care products. The group also set up a healthcare subsidiary called Nirlife to manufacture intravenous fluid.
20) Nirma beauty soap is one of the popular and leading soaps in the Indian market, behind Lux, and Lifebuoy. Nirma’s edible salt Shudh is doing well. Nirma also has successful operations in neighboring countries.
21) Karsanbhai also founded Nirma University in 2003 to diversify the brand portfolio.
22) In 2004 He launched the Nirma labs education project for entrepreneurs which develops aspiring entrepreneurs to face the different challenges of business.
23) Nirma became the first non-FMCG company in India to launch an IPO in November 2007 when it was listed on BSE and NSE. However, since its poor financial performance, currently, only 52% of its shares are free-floating.
24) In 2007, Nirma diversified into the restaurant business by acquiring a local "Oh! Calcutta" local chain for Rs 192 crores. It also entered into a contract with ITC Ltd to set up and operate food courts in various railway stations across India.
25) In November 2007, Nirma purchased American raw materials company Searles Valley Minerals Inc., making it among the top seven soda ash manufacturers in the world.
26) Nirma Group started cement manufacturing in 2014 from a single plant in Nimbol.
27) In 2015, Nirma launched "NIRMA Sanitary Napkins," intending to target rural women in their reproductive age group, which any other brand is not currently catering in that space.
28) In 2016, Nirma acquired Lafarge India's cement assets for $1.4 billion.
29) In February 2020, Nirma acquired Emami Cement for ₹5,500 crores (US$770 million).
30) Even today, Nirma remains the largest producer of soda ash in the world and the company has gone private since 2012.
31) Nirma has an overall 35% of detergents and a 20% market share in soap cakes.
32) Nirma's current CEO, Nitin Motwani, took over the charge from Mr. Patel in 2009, after his death. Before this, he had worked as CEO of the company's Gujarat Group for almost eight years.
33) As CSR, Karsanbhai has interests in education and founded Nirma Institute of Technology which grew into a leading engineering college in Gujarat and leading pharmacy college (Nirma Institute of Pharmacy) overseen by the Nirma Education and Research Foundation.
33) It has launched new brands such as "NIRMA SLIM" for women's toiletries and skincare, NIRMA TURIST for personal care and home care products, etc.
34) "NEERFA Sanitary Napkins" was launched in 2014 to address the unmet needs of rural women and later rebranding it as "NIRMA".
35) Nirma's network consisted of about 400 distributors and over 20 lakh retail outlets across the country.
This huge network-enabled Nirma to make its products available to the smallest village.
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Kirthee Bane
