Born in the cultural city of Thrissur in Kerala, Moothedath Panjan (MP) Ramachandran faced failures early on. While working as an accountant, he experimented with his whitener concoction by testing it in the kitchen. But it never achieved the desired quality, and he had to do something else.
2. One day, he found a chemical industry journal that said purple-coloured dyes might help textile manufacturers get the whitest, brightest colours possible. He returned to boiling, diluting, and testing the dye in his kitchen. This time, the results were different.
3. He finally got the quality and set up a temporary factory on family land in Thrissur, Kerala, using his brother’s Rs. 5000 as a loan. He wanted to name the factory after his first daughter. In 1983, Jyothy Laboratories was born.
4. The idea was simple Produce liquid fabric whiteners for brighter and whiter clothing. The first product was Ujala Supreme liquid fabric whiteners, which whitened the cloth with only purple dye. Ramachandran knew that the perfect segment was housewives, so he had an idea.
5. 5. He asked six ladies to sell door-to-door directly to housewives with a simple message: Four drops of Ujala would dazzle a family’s clothes. And the idea worked. By the end of the first year, Ujala clocked a profit of Rs 1440 and scaled to a revenue of Rs 40,000.
6. But the battle of blues had just started. Reckitt Benckizer’s Robin Blue was the market leader, and beating them was impossible. Ramachandran had a plan -move from powder blue to liquid blue, keep price points from Rs 1 to Rs 45, and advertise through the famous “Chaarbondo waala Ujala” ad. And magic happened. /
7. By 1997, Ujala rocketed to sales of 100 CR and became a household name, while Robin was down to a 3% market share. Ramachandran had arrived and invested Rs 35 CR into Maxo, a mosquito repellant brand, in the 1996 Dengue 1 epidemic. With that becoming a hit, it became a 300 CR brand.
8. As Jyothy expanded to incense sticks (Maya) and dishwashing bars (Exo), it raised 305.69 CR through an IPO that oversubscribed 45.83 times in 2007. However, the big turnaround came on 6 May 2011 when Jyothy acquired 50.97% of German FMCG giant Henkel AGs India business for 617 CR.
9. 9. Jyothy Labs was now being said alongside big industry names like P&G and HUL and clocked sales of 1017.38 CR in sales at a profit of 83.14 CR by 2013. With 1700 distributors in urban and 2000 sub-stockists in rural areas, its products were bought at 29 lakh shops in India.
10. Today, Jyothy Labs has revenue of 2757 CR and profits of 369 CR. With 23 plants and over 25 products, its Ujala Supreme remains the No. 1 fabric whitener product after forty years. C
Who would have thought that an ordinary accountant with failed experiments from Kerala would one day build a 16,000 CR business empire?
