Zebras, as Kiran Khalap, MD and co-founder of brand consultancy Chlorophyll points out, have a very high digestion capacity. “You will never see a thin zebra, as I learned when I was in Tanzania.” Ergo the zebra’s head for his client Indigo Paints – and, because paints mean colours, it had to be a coloured zebra.
Hemant Jalan, founder and managing director of the Pune-headquartered Indigo Paints, says he started the business ‘as a joke’ in Jharkhand two decades ago after visiting a cement paint manufacturer. “I went to the market and assured potential customers that we would give them a bill including taxes. This was something unheard of in this business, so people laughed at me,” he recalls. “But it became our USP!”
Jalan soon realised, however, that Jharkhand was the wrong location for a cement paint plant, as the major raw materials came from Jodhpur. He put a small advertisement in a local newspaper there for a closed small unit on rent. He got one and started manufacturing there.
The company was doing reasonably okay, so he decided to add products like distemper, primer, and emulsion, and took over two units in south India: Kochi in Kerala and Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu. “I had no coherent strategy or vision: I had to fight for survival,” he says. Volumes continued to grow under its four brand names for its four different products, but not fast enough for Jalan’s taste – so he decided to go to a brand consultant.