Proud to announce that Reckitt Benckiser (RB) leads 45 Cr investment round in Bombay Shaving Company

Today, we welcome Reckitt Benckiser as our latest strategic investor alongside some of the most powerful HNIs in the country like Rajesh Sud from Bharti Enterprises, Anjali Bansal of Avaana Capital, and Kuldeep Jain from Cleanmax Energy in our latest round. We believe that this is a crucial tipping point in our organisation. 

RB’s investment will provide the Visage Lines team with access to RB’s global scale, expertise, and mentorship. In our journey to become leaders in personal care for men and women, this is just the kind of support a young organisation like ours needed to steer the course. In the last 4 years, we have been blessed to have some of the largest companies and investors in the world like Sixth Sense, Fireside Ventures (exited), Colgate Palmolive, and now RB guiding us through this complex journey. We thank them for supporting our ambition by committing capital and time to our company. 

We are honoured to have Arjun Purkayastha, RB’s Senior Vice President, eCommerce, Digital, and Ventures join the Visage Lines board. 

Global investors with glocal insights

About 2 years back Colgate Palmolive decided to support our endeavors by investing in us. This enabled us to make gigantic leaps in our products, marketing and processes. Our determination and perseverance went up, as did our ambition to drive the maximum value back to our stakeholders. This was our first global exposure, and since then we continue to enjoy the richness of insight shared with us by our global mentors. We are now super excited to get RB’s guidance and accelerate this glocal learning to become even better entrenched in the Indian consumer ecosystem.

We are category creators and reinventors

We are a small young made-in-India company. With 120 people, one modest office, about 100 SKUs, and a team at an average age of 28, we are by no means a big formidable entity. We started with a rather simple ambition – to make grooming solutions that would make men enjoy their shaves a lot more. A daily task that we wanted to add more value, joy, and delight to. It is not easy to reinvent experiences – especially ones that have been entrenched into our behavior through cultural conditioning and family direction. Shaving is a very generationally passed down habit, and we were clearly trying to do something that had not been done before. 

After a million customers, over half a million razors along with shaving, beard care, skincare, and bath essentials for men and women, we can safely say that we understand how to make really good grooming solutions. And we are getting better at reinventing this category and creating new solutions, every day. 

We are digitally born omnichannel nurtured 

Visage Line’s core strength is in creating and scaling digitally-born-omnichannel-nurtured consumer brands. Our driving force was never about raising capital. We were constantly focussed on driving more value to our customers, building tremendous equity in shaving, and creating a challenger brand in a very complex ecosystem. We have just started to see the impact of our early decisions that have enabled us to build a conservative and profitability focussed organisation. 

We started as a digital-first brand but over the years we have expanded across channels and our consumer centricity supported by honest storytelling ensures that we are one of the top 3 brands in the categories we operate. We are available on our website, across all leading e-commerce marketplaces, and in about 10,000 stores across 25 cities. 

We invest in our product portfolio, team, ideas, and capabilities

COVID taught us the importance of thinking outside the box and be more agile. We pressed the pedal on strategic investments that would give us exponential returns over a period. We paid a lot more attention to customer need gaps. One insight was that women were not going to the parlor and needed grooming solutions. In the middle of the lockdown, we launched our Defender for Her women’s razor with Flexblade Technology. We have just introduced a range of face razors for women. We are seeing immense growth and customer love for our range of women’s shaving solutions. 

We also committed to bringing more superfoods-powered personal care products, and our range of shaving foams with turmeric, charcoal, apple cider vinegar, aloe vera, and coffee are top sellers across the country. Our gift solutions remain a preferred choice for customers who make us a part of their joyous occasions like Rakhi, Diwali, and Valentines. We added more talent into our company, made our tech stack more robust, and committed to bringing in senior leadership to steer the organisation.

We have a long way to go, but we shall get there, together!

As we scale operations to reach a 150 Cr top line in the next fiscal, we are steadily expanding in offline retail distribution as the post-Covid footfalls ramp up. Our team is building omnichannel revenue streams and we are cognisant that brands will be scaled through strong digital and retail distribution. We truly cherish our strategic partners and over the long term, we hope to be able to add significant value to their engagement with us. 

There is still some way to go before we become a household brand, but we are steady on that path and with the support of our investors, mentors, team, and partners, we shall get there, together. Thank you for being a part of our journey. We couldn’t have done it without.