Brand story: How entrepreneur MP Ramachandran made Ujala fabric whitener a laundry bestseller

Most problems that change the world don’t look like problems at all.

They look like mild inconveniences, the kind of thing most people shrug off and live with.

MP Ramachandran couldn’t shrug it off. He was obsessed with white clothes, wore only white shirts, washed them himself and was perpetually dissatisfied with the result. The whites faded, they yellowed, they looked like they’d given up. And every fabric whitener on the market made the problem worse rather than better.

Most people would have bought a different shirt.

Ramachandran built a company.

MP Ramachandran was not a typical entrepreneur. He was an accountant working in Mumbai who wore only white. His biggest frustration was that whites never stayed that way, they faded quickly, stains showed more easily and they looked old and ragged faster than coloured clothes.

That frustration became the catalyst.

Robin Blue was the dominant player in fabric whiteners at the time. But the problem with these powders was the process: consumers had to manually dissolve the powder, strain it through cloth and hope it didn’t leave blue patches on the fabric. Messy, unreliable and it still didn’t deliver the whiteness it promised.

Ramachandran’s eureka moment came when he read an article in a chemical industry journal describing...

Read more