Fading gloss

Remember that beige-pink powder your mother kept under the kitchen sink to polish her brass and copper ware? With just a little elbow grease, it would scrub away blackish oxidation to restore the vessel’s shine. Ravindra Prabhudesai, who founded the Pitambari Group in 1989, turned that powder into a huge business. His steadfast clientele includes people like Mumbai-based homemaker Sudha Jagannadhan, who has been buying 200 gm of the Pitambari shining powder every month for almost a decade to polish her brass lamps. “It is as regular a purchase for me as rice or atta,” she says.

Pitambari powder, which Prabhudesai, a chemistry graduate, created in the early 1980s, has helped the group grow from an initial investment of ₹50,000 to a turnover of ₹70 crore in FY12 and a headcount of over 600 employees. The flagship product still brings in 60% of sales and is the unquestioned category leader with a 95% share of the metal-shining powder market.

It wasn’t a shining success initially. Prabhudesai started off selling the product to hotels. But the small customer base was affecting growth: “After three years, we had no big orders and had made a profit of just ₹2,000,” he recalls. During a visit to a neighbouring locality, he noticed that middle and lower middle class families had stacks of brass vessels that they polished using traditional scrubs like buttermilk and tamarind. Prabhudesai knew he had discovered a large market that could use the copper-shining product he was selling to hotels. But not everybody agreed. People said the world was moving towards stainless steel and aluminium, that a product like his would find no demand.

He persisted, tinkering with the formulation and pitching samples in neighbouring areas. “From 10 packets a day, we slowly sold more than 1,000 packets monthly and this generated the interest of shopkeepers,” he says. “Soon, we began seeing sales of 10,000 packets in a month.” The homecare segment still accounts for 80% of sales.