How sanitary napkin brand Paree focused on three Ps—product, people and pace—to ride the Covid storm
Managing team of Soothe Healthcare, the makers of Paree Sanitary Napkins, Noida, India. (From L to R), Atulya Nair, Shilpi Negi (sitting), Shivani Maini, Shruti Kapoor, Sahil Dharia, CEO & founder (sitting), Sharad Khise
Image: Madhu Kapparath
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A career in ‘buy-side’ makes one smart enough to know the ‘sell side’. Well, that’s what the conventional investing mantra states. Back in 2001, when Sahil Dharia started his career at UBS Investment Bank in New York, he was gradually getting a hang of three crucial things: Number crunching, data slicing and in-depth market analysis. “I was on the buy-side for two years,” he recounts. Buy-side is the side of the financial market that buys and invests securities. As an analyst, Dharia learnt the art of how, when and where to deploy capital. The learning, though, was incomplete. There were two ‘Ws’ missing.
Cut to 2012. When Dharia quit his job as global head of operations, (investment research content) at Thomson Reuters, he was supporting operations with over $200 million revenue footprint across the globe. The 32-year-old had cracked the first ‘w’ when he decided to turn employer. “I knew who to call,” recalls Dharia, who called up his old boss at UBS and discussed the business venture. The boss was sold out. “I have been waiting for this call for years,” he quipped. The next line sealed the fleeting conversation: “How much money do you need to start?” Dharia started his Day 1 with Rs 8 crore as seed investment.
The second missing ‘w’ flowed from the first one. When Dharia took the entrepreneurial plunge and started Soothe Healthcare in 2012, he knew the ‘why’. “I wanted to do something that was good for business, and good for community,” he recalls. Nothing better than the business of sanitary pads. Why? Two big reasons, reckons the founder and chief executive officer. First, only 12 percent of women in India used sanitary napkins. Now the community problem: High school dropout rate of girls across India due to menstrual hygiene issues. Second, most of the women who were using napkin were largely confined to top cities and metros. Bharat—small villages, towns and cities—offered a massive headroom for growth. “We wanted to be Pond’s and Lux. We didn’t want to be Forest Essentials,” he says, alluding to the mass popularity of the soap brands of HUL, and the niche luxury play of Forest Essentials. Dharia, subsequently, started a pilot for Paree sanitary napkins in Pune and Cochin, and rolled out the product in Punjab in 2015. The same year, shuttler Saina Nehwal was roped in as brand ambassador, who later became an investor in the company.