05/09/2026
This is the story of Emami, and it has one of the smartest branding decisions in Indian business history.
In 1974, two Kolkata-based chartered accountants, Radhe Shyam Agarwal and Radhe Shyam Goenka, left secure careers at the Birla Group to start a cosmetics company.
Capital?
Just ₹20,000, borrowed from Goenka’s father.
The bigger problem was the market.
Imported cosmetics dominated India, while cosmetics carried heavy taxation and were treated as non-priority goods.
So the founders started small, selling talcum powder, creams and shampoos.
And in the early days, they literally moved their own stock on hand-pulled rickshaws, delivering products and collecting payments themselves.
But their first big breakthrough came from an unexpected move.
In 1978, they acquired a struggling Ayurvedic company called Himani.
Instead of fighting multinational brands on their turf, they went where the multinationals had little interest:
Ayurveda.
That decision eventually gave birth to brands like BoroPlus and Navratna.
Today, Emami has built a portfolio of 300+ products with a presence across dozens of countries and thousands of retail outlets in India.
And there's an even crazier detail.
The name “Emami” meant absolutely nothing.
The founders chose it because it sounded Italian.
They understood something incredibly important about Indian consumers at the time:
Perception comes before product.
The name sounded foreign.
The products eventually made the name Indian.
And that's perhaps the biggest lesson from Emami:
You don't inherit a brand identity.
You build it.
What Indian brand did you once assume was foreign?
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