There's a particular kind of hubris that comes with launching a premium men's grooming brand in India. You're essentially betting that Indian men, who've spent generations reaching for whatever's cheapest at the kirana store, will suddenly pay ₹3,500 for a metal razor kit. Shantanu Deshpande made that bet in 2016.
He lost it. Then he won anyway.
Today, Bombay Shaving Company sits at ₹550 crore in claimed revenue, on the cusp of an IPO, with something that borders on the absurd: investment stakes from both Colgate-Palmolive and Reckitt—even as the company positions itself to chip away at their rival Gillette's dominance. Nine years removed from that premium shaving kit, Deshpande's company now sprawls across 80,000 retail stores, sells trimmers alongside hair-removal wax, and counts women as a quarter of its customer base.
The journey from niche D2C darling to mass-market contender is a case study in strategic whiplash. Or maybe just survival.
A McKinsey Playbook Meets Indian Reality
Deshpande, a former McKinsey consultant, incorporated Visage Lines Personal Care Private Limited in October 2015 with three co-founders: Raunak Munot from GroupM, Deepu Panicker (IIT Bombay and McKinsey), and Rohit Jaiswal from IIM Udaipur. The inspiration was obvious—Dollar Shave Club and Harry's had just rewritten the US grooming playbook with subscription models and sleek branding.
The original Bombay Shaving Company kit, launched in 2016, came with an engraved metal razor, blades, and grooming products packaged to feel luxurious. At ₹3,000 to ₹3,500, it was positioned as a smarter alternative to what Deshpande viewed as Gillette's overpriced cartridge monopoly. Twenty-five angel investors believed the pitch enough to contribute $600,000 in August 2016, including Tata veteran S. Ramadorai and McKinsey's Noshir Kaka.
A year later, Fireside Ventures led a $2.3 million pre-Series A. The messaging was clean: Indian men would pay for quality grooming if someone actually bothered to offer it. By August 2018, Colgate-Palmolive Asia Pacific invested ₹18 crore for a 14% stake—the FMCG giant's first startup bet in India. At that point, Bombay Shaving Company had established 700 retail touchpoints across four cities, contributing roughly 20% of revenue.
The Colgate money bought more than just credibility. It bought a front-row education in how legacy consumer companies actually scale in India.
March 2020: The Uncomfortable Reckoning
Then the pandemic arrived and erased the business model.
Salons shuttered. Men stopped shaving daily—why bother on Zoom calls? Subscription revenue, that beautiful predictable metric that makes investors swoon, started hemorrhaging. Forbes India later reported that Deshpande and his team spent those early pandemic months doing the thing founders hate most: admitting their core thesis might be wrong.
The answer came from watching what was actually moving. Trimmers were selling. Women's products—almost an afterthought in the catalog—were gaining traction. According to a December 2022 Forbes India interview, Deshpande realized they'd misunderstood their own company. They weren't a men's shaving brand. They were a hair-removal company.
That shift sounds semantic. It wasn't.
In Q3-Q4 2020, Bombay Shaving Company launched Bombae, a women's grooming line spanning razors, trimmers, wax strips, and hair-removal creams. They expanded the trimmer portfolio across price points from ₹699 to ₹1,999. The mission pivoted from selling premium grooming rituals to making everyday hair removal less terrible across genders and income brackets.
It worked, though whether out of genius or necessity is hard to say. By FY22, women's products reportedly accounted for 20-25% of revenue. Trimmers became volume drivers. The company stopped asking Indians to adopt new behaviors and started offering better tools for habits they already had.
Sometimes strategy is just paying attention.
The Backing That Shouldn't Make Sense—But Does
In January 2021, Reckitt led a ₹45 crore strategic round, placing its Senior Vice President Arjun Purkayastha on Bombay Shaving Company's board. Now the startup held equity from two of the world's largest consumer goods companies, both competing in adjacent or overlapping categories.
The logic, twisted as it seems, tracks. Colgate and Reckitt likely saw Bombay Shaving Company as a fast-moving challenger that could either disrupt from below or become a useful partner from within. Either scenario warranted owning a piece. For Deshpande, the capital came bundled with something harder to buy: operational playbooks from companies that understand India's impossibly fragmented retail landscape.
January 2022 brought a ₹160 crore Series C led by Malabar Investments, extended by another ₹50 crore from Gulf Islamic Investments a month later. The war chest was now substantial enough to support real ambition: matching the incumbents shelf by shelf.
The D2C Brand That Became a Retail Brand
By 2024, Bombay Shaving Company had planted itself in roughly 80,000 stores. The revenue split between online and offline hit 50:50—a stark departure from the direct-to-consumer orthodoxy that defined its early years. The company opened 14 exclusive brand outlets with plans to scale to 100. It secured placement in modern trade chains like Reliance Retail and D-Mart. It became the preferred product partner for 300-plus Lakmé Salons.
In a 2023 BrandEquity interview, Deshpande articulated the shift with unusual candor: "We are not a D2C brand, yet we rely on it for marketing." Translation: the website and digital channels became customer acquisition engines and storytelling vehicles. Revenue came from everywhere else.
The company even refreshed its logo in 2024 to stand out on crowded retail shelves. You don't redesign for shelf impact if you're still primarily selling subscription boxes online. Small signal, big shift.
The Numbers Tell Two Stories
FY23 financials revealed the growing pains: total revenue of ₹182.4 crore against a net loss of ₹80.3 crore. Marketing spend alone hit ₹83 crore that year, nearly matching material costs of ₹88.3 crore. The unit economics looked brutal.
FY24 showed improvement, if not quite redemption. Operating revenue crossed ₹204 crore (some sources cite as high as ₹226 crore). Net losses narrowed to ₹62.1 crore—a 22-23% improvement year-over-year. The company raised ₹24 crore in venture debt from Alteria Capital in April 2024, a sign that banks believed the fundamentals were trending right.
Then came November 2025. Bombay Shaving Company raised ₹136 crore in a round led by Sixth Sense Ventures, with participation from founder Deshpande himself, the Patni Family Office, Gulf Islamic Investments, and cricketer Rahul Dravid among other high-net-worth individuals. The company claimed it had achieved profit-after-tax profitability in FY25 with a net revenue run-rate exceeding ₹550 crore. The messaging was explicit: we're preparing for an IPO.
Those FY25 profitability and run-rate figures are company claims made in fundraising announcements, not yet audited. Still, the arc from ₹182 crore in FY23 to a claimed ₹550 crore run-rate in FY25 represents the kind of inflection that makes bankers start returning your calls.
The Gillette Problem and the IPO Gamble
The company now targets ₹500 crore in annual recurring revenue by FY26 and aims to reach 100 million users within three years. It claims double-digit market shares in trimmers, electric shavers, and women's grooming products—categories still dominated by Philips and others, but increasingly fragmented.
Competing with Gillette on razors while holding investments from Colgate and Reckitt creates an odd, almost comedic dynamic. Bombay Shaving Company isn't really going head-to-head on premium five-blade cartridges. Instead, it's competing on accessibility, localization, and speed across categories. The company has developed products like an Eco Razor made from coconut shell and bamboo. It's localized trimmer manufacturing in India.
The IPO timeline remains unspecified, but the recent capital raise, profitability claims, and public messaging suggest it's coming within 12-18 months. Whether public market investors will value a grooming brand with FMCG giant backing at a premium multiple—or see it as just another consumer business grinding toward thin margins—will be the final test of this pivot.
Deshpande himself made headlines in 2022 for a controversial LinkedIn post advocating 18-hour workdays for fresh graduates. The post sparked predictable outrage, but it also revealed something about his approach: a willingness to stake out uncomfortable positions and deal with the backlash later.
He's built a company using the same instinct. It started premium and went mass. It started online and bet on stores. It started with men and expanded to women. Nine years in, the real validation isn't the funding rounds or the claimed profitability.
It's that two of the world's largest consumer companies thought it was worth owning a piece of the thing that's supposed to disrupt them. Whether that makes Bombay Shaving Company a Trojan horse or just another portfolio company depends entirely on what happens next.
For now, Deshpande is preparing to let public markets decide.
