Calcutta: Faced with the prospect of expanding market reach and challenges of declining sales of existing products, Emami Ltd has decided to revamp the male fairness range by rebranding ‘Fair & Handsome’, a core brand of the company for two decades.

With an eye to garner a bigger pie of the male grooming segment, which is outpacing the wider FMCG industry, the personal care major from Calcutta unveiled ‘Smart and Handsome’, under which it will launch an array of products by the middle of 2025.

Armed with a media blitzkrieg and Bollywood actor Kartik Aryan as brand ambassador, Emami is hoping to quadruple sales to ₹1,000 crore, vice-chairman and whole-time director Mohan Goenka said on Thursday, describing the re-branding as a ‘big, bold move’.

According to an estimate presented by Emami, the male grooming range stands at ₹17,850 crore in 2023 and growing by 7.2 per cent CAGR to reach ₹34,850 crore by 2032. In contrast, the categories Emami is present in — fairness cream and face wash — is just about ₹759 crore.

“The new brand will allow us to enter many new categories within the male grooming range, namely skin care, hair care, shave care, fragrances and moustache and beard. There is a far bigger opportunity out there, which we want to tap,” Goenka said.

He said so far there has been no pressing need to change the brand. The market for fairness cream faced a backlash in 2020, leading HUL to drop the word ‘Fair’ from the ‘Fair & Lovely’ cream for women.

Emami, which claimed to have created the men’s fairness cream segment with ‘Fair & Handsome’, stuck to the name in the domestic market. For exports, it started selling under the Smart & Handsome brand two years back.

In India, the company is hoping to ride the existing distribution channel of ‘Fair & Handsome’ to reach the markets for the new categories of products.

“While there are brands in each of these categories within the male grooming range, there is no single brand. We want to be in that space with Smart & Handsome’,” Goenka said. Emami wants to play in the mass and prestige segment, with packs starting from as low as ₹10.

Incidentally, the company has acquired a premium range under the brand of The Man Company, which operates in the direct-to-consumer space.

‘Fair & Handsome’ is about a ₹250-crore brand. Emami’s male grooming range, which also includes a deo under brand ‘He’, shrunk by 3 per cent in FY24 and 9 per cent in H1FY25.

Abneesh Roy of Nuvama Institutional Securities noted that a ‘major overhaul’ was needed as F&H brand was ‘struggling’. “The change reflects changing consumer preference towards diversity. It will also expand the market from a niche segment to a much larger segment,” he said.