From small beginnings to big businesses: Parryware, Shamani, Confetti Gifts, and other top stories of the week

Entrepreneurship in India is full of innovative ideas and creative business solutions to several problems. The country is no stranger to the stories of energetic and determined entrepreneurs who started small and went on to build business empires worth crores.

This week, SMBStory explored the business and growth journeys of popular brands Parryware, Shamani Industries, Confetti Gifts, and more.

Parryware

In the late 1780s, Thomas Parry, a Welsh merchant, set foot on Indian soil to start a trading business. Over the next two decades, he grew his operations in the British colony. He ventured into the distillery business, naming his operations East India Distilleries Parry (EID Parry for short). Parry’s legacy continued as the business ran post-Independence in the 1950s.

Around that time, the firm used to import sulfuric acid in ships. It required ceramic containers to store the chemical. So it began making the ceramics at its single pottery unit in Ranipet, Tamil Nadu.

As India did not have many toilets in those days, EID Parry saw an opportunity to leverage its ceramic manufacturing capacity at the pottery unit to make the Indian squatting pan. 

This sparked the beginning of Parryware.

In addition to toilets, the Chennai-based brand makes sinks, faucets, heaters, cisterns, pumps, and more. It is now under Roca, a Spanish sanitary products group which that over Parryware in 2006. The company's revenue was approximately Rs 1,600 crore in the calendar year 2019.

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Shamani Industries

Raj Shamani was 16 when his father suffered a diabetic attack and his business started going downhill. The family’s financial situation was such that meeting day-to-day needs and healthcare expenses became arduous. Raj’s father traded in chemicals used to make soaps and detergents. The best Raj could think of was to make and sell soaps.

Now 24, Raj is one of the youngest entrepreneurs in India with a Rs 200-crore turnover company Shamani Industries, after having started out with making soaps at home and going door to door to sell them.

The company’s product portfolio has now grown to 16, including dishwashing liquid, soap, detergent powder, toilet cleaner, floor cleaner, and sanitiser. It has a strong presence in Indore and nearby areas. 

Raw materials such as labsa, soda, salt, alpha-olefin sulfonate, and sodium laureth sulfate are sourced from companies including Tata, Nirma, and the Aditya Birla Group. Shamani Industries is also a contract manufacturer for Info Edge-backed ShopKirana and is in talks with other companies.

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Confetti Gifts

Confetti Gifts is a Jaipur-based gifting brand founded in February 2020 by Saumya Kabra. The brand started out with corporate gifting and slowly made its way into the B2C space. The company was able to clock Rs 2.5 crore turnover this year despite the pandemic.

Saumya had returned from the UK in January 2019 after completing her MBA from the University of Manchester. She wanted to order some goodies for her friends in India but couldn’t find any portal that combined “personalisation and emotions of the sender.” 

She elaborates, “The available gifting options were very basic and didn’t really care about individual emotions. The variety was very limited and there was nothing that honoured an individual’s taste or likeness.” 

This got Saumya thinking. Interested in becoming an entrepreneur because of the freedom of expression attached to it, she thought this was the right time and segment to dive into. She founded Confetti Gifts with an initial investment of Rs 50,000 amassed from personal savings. 

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Other top stories

Fitday

In 2016, biotech graduate Suresh Raju started Genomelabs, a nutraceuticals manufacturing business, in Hyderabad. From an early stage, he realised consumers would increasingly look to lead wellness-oriented lifestyles and care about nutrition and fitness.

To reach customers effectively, he felt he needed a customer-facing, omnichannel nutrition store that would act as a marketplace for various nutraceutical products - not just those made by Genomelabs.

In 2020, this led to the formation of Fitday, a wellness marketplace for functional foods, medical foods, immunity boosters, and health and wellness products.

“Following an omnichannel approach, we set up an online platform fitday.in, and three brick-and-mortar stores in Hyderabad. In just a year, Fitday’s revenue from online sales and store walk-ins has been Rs 3 crore. We are expecting to reach Rs 10 crore next year,” he says.

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