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Most spice brands start with, well, spices. Rakesh Masala didn't. Its first two products were a herbal mixture and a box of ritual essentials, and only later did the company become a name in Indian kitchens. A Herbal Mixture and a Puja Kit Rakesh Masala traces its origins to 1975, when S.P. Chaudhary, whose full name is Suresh Prasad Chaudhary, founded Rakesh Group. By the company's own account, it began with just two products: Rakesh Achwani Batisa, a mixture of 32 herbs als

Before the Range Rover had a name, its prototypes were registered under a decoy company called Velar. The word came from the Italian "velare," meaning to veil or to cover. The name was a disguise. Behind it was a vehicle whose makers were still working out what, exactly, they had built. An Idea That Waited Fifteen Years The Rover Company, which created the Land Rover, had been thinking about a larger, more road-friendly model since 1951. That year, engineer Gordon Bashford de

In the mid-1980s, a luxury house in Milan made a bag out of a material associated with military equipment and parachutes. Within a few years, that choice would help redefine what luxury could look like. Two Brothers and an Arcade Prada began in 1913, when brothers Mario and Martino Prada opened a shop called Fratelli Prada, "Prada Brothers," in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. The Galleria, built in the 1860s beneath a soaring iron-and-glass roof next to the city's cath

Most skincare brands are named after a feeling: glow, radiance, pure. CeraVe is named after its chemistry. And that choice says a lot about how the brand built its reputation. A Name That Spells Out the Science CeraVe takes the "Cera" from ceramides, the lipids that help maintain the skin's barrier, and the "Ve" from MVE, a delivery system designed to release ingredients gradually over time. The brand describes its idea simply: many common skin problems, from dryness to eczem

Most second acts disappoint. The Derma Co's didn't, because its founders already knew what had worked the first time, and had the discipline to use it. The Brand Behind the Brand The Derma Co was launched in 2020 by Varun Alagh and Ghazal Alagh, the husband-and-wife founders of Mamaearth, as the second brand under their company, Honasa Consumer Limited. Mamaearth had been founded in 2016, and its own origin story is well known: before any serum existed, the couple had been as

On October 6, 2014, millions of Indians sat down to a shopping event Flipkart had promoted for weeks. By the early hours, the site was struggling, and the hashtag "#Flopkart" was spreading across social media. By any normal standard, it was a disaster. It also became one of the most important days in the history of Indian e-commerce. Two Amazon Alumni and a Flat Numbered 610 Flipkart was founded on October 22, 2007, in Bengaluru, by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, two IIT Del

Logitech's name tells you what its founders wanted to build, and it isn't a mouse. The word comes from "logiciel," the French for software, plus "tech." The company that gave millions of people a mouse began by trying to be a software company. Three Founders and a Swiss Farm Logitech was founded on October 2, 1981, in Apples, a village in the Swiss canton of Vaud, by Daniel Borel, Pierluigi Zappacosta, and Giacomo Marini. Borel and Zappacosta had met at Stanford University in

Before cement became a household word in India, it had to be sold as an idea. The company that did the selling, long before it joined the Adani Group, was formed by a merger that India's cement industry still counts as its first big consolidation. A Merger to Fix a Fragmented Market ACC was established on August 1, 1936, in Mumbai, as The Associated Cement Companies Limited, through the merger of ten existing cement companies (some accounts count eleven). The companies belong

Most great companies begin with a problem. Figma began with two students, a computer science department, and a stubborn belief about what the web could do. Dylan Field and Evan Wallace were both studying computer science at Brown University when they started working on the idea that would become Figma. Wallace was a graphics specialist and a teaching assistant in the department. Field chaired the CS Departmental Undergraduate Group. In 2012, Field was named a Thiel Fellow, re

Most new consumer brands start small and scale up. When Kumar Mangalam Birla launched Birla Opus in February 2024, he did the opposite, and he said so himself: no paint company anywhere in the world, he noted, had ever launched factories, operations, products, and services together at this scale. A Giant Looks at a Crowded Market The Aditya Birla Group's flagship company, Grasim Industries, entered decorative paints with a clear target. It was aiming at India's roughly ₹80,00

Every chapter of Silicon Valley's history seems to trace back to the same place — Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that trained an entire generation of engineers before they scattered to build the industry's biggest names. AMD was one of those offshoots. On May 1, 1969, Jerry Sanders, an electrical engineer who had been part of Fairchild, left with a group of his former colleagues to start something of their own: Advanced Micro Devices. Sanders didn't just carry technical

Long before online shopping, a Bengal weaver could spend days at the loom making a saree of rare beauty, and still struggle to find a fair way to sell it. Bengal’s handloom weavers were spread across villages and small households, and reaching buyers at scale was hard. On 1 October 1954, the Government of West Bengal set up an answer. It was called the West Bengal State Handloom Weavers’ Co-operative Society Ltd., known to the world as Tantuja. A Name That Means “Products of

Before 2020, Indian mobile users knew two telecom names well: Vodafone and Idea. In 2018, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular merged to form Vodafone Idea Limited, becoming one of the country’s major telecom operators. For the next two years, the company ran two separate consumer brands while it worked on the less visible task of joining two large networks, two sets of people and two sets of processes. Then, in September 2020, the two brands became one. 7 September 2020: Vi Is B

When the first Shoppers Stop opened in a Mumbai suburb in 1991, it sold only menswear. Three decades later, the company's most valuable asset isn't a store, a brand, or a location. It's a membership club that, in a recent quarter, accounted for 85 percent of its sales. A Menswear Store in Andheri Shoppers Stop was started in 1991 by the K Raheja Corp Group, led by Chandru Raheja. Its first store opened on October 27, 1991, in Andheri, a suburb of Mumbai, on S.V. Road near Vis

In the summer of 1888, visitors at Kolkata's harbour noticed crates of soap bars stamped with the words "Made in England by Lever Brothers." Nobody there could have known they were looking at the first chapter of what would become one of India's largest consumer companies. The Crates at the Harbour Those crates held Sunlight soap, and with them came a new idea for Indian households: branded products that made everyday life a little easier. Other Lever Brothers brands followed

In 1923, Albert Einstein travelled to Eindhoven to give a lecture, not at a university, but at a laboratory belonging to a company that made light bulbs. That detail says almost everything about how Philips became Philips. A Company That Chose to Invent Philips was founded in 1891 in Eindhoven by Gerard Philips and his father Frederik, with a plan to make cost-effective, reliable incandescent bulbs. The company's early years were about manufacturing. But in 1914, a decision b

Most online brands pay Google and Facebook to find customers. Goibibo's founder asked a different question: what if that same money went to the customers themselves? The answer became one of the more talked-about growth ideas in Indian travel. A Google India Head Goes Looking for a Problem Ashish Kashyap spent roughly eighteen months as Country Head of Google India and had earlier built e-commerce ventures at Indiatimes.com. In January 2007, he founded Ibibo Group in Gurgaon

Almost every Indian traveller of a certain age has a budget-hotel story: the room that looked fine online and turned out to be anything but. A teenager from Odisha saw that gap, not as a complaint, but as a business. A Teenager, a Travel Idea, and a Pivot Ritesh Agarwal, born in Odisha in 1993, began with a travel idea of his own: Oravel Stays, a platform for listing and booking budget accommodation. Sources differ on whether it started in 2011 or 2012, but in 2012 it was acc

Every travel booking starts with the same quiet frustration: dozens of tabs, dozens of prices, and no way of knowing whether the number on the screen is the best one. trivago was built to end that frustration. Its most famous advertising promised exactly that. And in 2022, an Australian court ruled that the promise hadn't always been kept. Four Friends and a Search Problem The idea for trivago took shape in 2004, among four college friends: Rolf Schrömgens, Peter Vinnemeier,

Every great brand story tends to start small, and Airbnb's beginning was smaller than most — three air mattresses on an apartment floor. In October 2007, roommates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were living in San Francisco and struggling to pay their rent. That same week, a major design conference was coming to the city — the Industrial Designers Society of America conference — and hotel rooms nearby were sold out, leaving many attendees with nowhere to stay. Chesky and Gebbia