Relaxo Sparx – "It's In Me": A Youth Lifestyle Repositioning
Industry & Competitive Context
India is the world's second-largest footwear producer and market, though branded, organised players still account for a minority of total volume, with continued structural shift from unbranded to branded footwear underway. The organised footwear segment has been projected by analysts (YES Securities) to grow at roughly 13% CAGR versus about 8% for the overall footwear industry, with the organised share expected to rise toward 40% of the total market. Regulatory tailwinds including the 2018 GST reduction on footwear priced below ₹1,000 to 5%, and the tightening of Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) quality norms have progressively favoured larger, compliant manufacturers over the unorganised sector.
Within this landscape, Relaxo Footwears Ltd, incorporated in 1984, is described in its own annual report as India's largest footwear manufacturer, with a brand portfolio spanning Relaxo, Sparx, Bahamas and Flite. Equity research from ICICI Direct characterises Relaxo as the dominant player in the open-footwear (slippers/sandals) category, accounting for roughly 76% of its sales, with a manufacturing capacity of about 10 lakh (1 million) pairs per day and annual volumes of close to 19 crore (190 million) pairs in the value-priced segment. Business Standard reporting on a YES Securities note states that Sparx and Flite, launched from FY05 onward as Relaxo's move into the premium/branded segment, together contribute approximately 75% of company revenue making Sparx one of the two flagship brands carrying Relaxo's growth and margin ambitions. Relaxo's principal listed competitor in footwear retailing is Bata India, and the company's shares are listed on the NSE and BSE.
For FY2023-24, Relaxo's Directors' Report to shareholders recorded revenue from operations of ₹2,914.06 crore (up 4.72% year-on-year from ₹2,782.77 crore), EBITDA of ₹406.59 crore, and profit after tax of ₹200.47 crore, against ₹154.47 crore in the prior year indicating a business scaling profitably even as the industry underwent periods of raw-material and demand volatility.
Brand Situation Prior to Campaign
Sparx was launched by Relaxo as a sports-and-casual footwear brand targeted at young consumers. Akshay Kumar was first signed as brand ambassador for Sparx in 2012, under the tagline "Add Sparx to your life," with a television commercial built around an action-adventure narrative (a stolen phone chase) designed to convey style, youthfulness and energy, as reported by BestMediaInfo at the time.
By 2021, Relaxo's own marketing leadership described a formal repositioning exercise. Gaurav Dua, Executive Director Marketing & Sales at Relaxo Footwear, stated in an interview with afaqs! that the brand was moving its positioning from "Add Sparx to your life" to "It's In Me," specifically to sharpen the brand's connect with a millennial and Gen-Z audience. Exchange4media reported that this repositioning was conceptualised and created by DDB Mudra, and was explicitly intended to communicate a shift in target audience language and tone rather than merely refresh a tagline.
Strategic Objective
Across multiple on-record statements, Relaxo's marketing leadership frames the objective of the "It's In Me" platform consistently: to widen Sparx's connect with youth by moving the brand narrative from external product attributes (style, price, durability) toward an internal, aspirational idea self-belief and inner potential. Gaurav Dua told Exchange4media that the campaign "is a shout-out for youngsters of today and urges them to push boundaries and overcome... doubts to seek their inner potential," while FashionNetwork India quoted him describing the brand communication as designed to "tug at the core of the youth, urging them to quash any self-doubts and seek out the best in themselves."
A second, parallel objective disclosed by Dua to afaqs! was channel-sequencing: Relaxo stated an explicit intent to lead with digital-first launches ahead of television, on the reasoning that "digital has grown in India" and reaches youth audiences more efficiently a deliberate change from the brand's historical approach of leading with TV.
Campaign Architecture & Execution
The "It's In Me" platform has been executed as a multi-year, serial campaign rather than a single burst of activity, with at least three distinct waves documented in trade press between 2021 and 2023, all retaining Akshay Kumar as brand ambassador and the "It's In Me" / #ItsInMeChallenge line.
2021 wave: The film depicted Akshay Kumar preparing for a shot on a film set; on learning his co-star has not arrived, he inspires a young bystander to face the challenge himself a narrative device used to transfer the "spark" from the established star to an ordinary young protagonist. Afaqs! reported that Relaxo marked this as the brand's 15th year in the market at the time of the campaign.
2023 wave ("boundless energy" film): A subsequent TVC opened with Akshay Kumar in a kite-flying contest against a young boy and his friends; after Kumar wins the boy's kite, the boy responds, "Akshay sir, kaata hai, loota nahi hain" ("I've lost it, but you haven't lost it" i.e., defeat in one round doesn't mean losing one's spirit). Afaqs! reported this as reinforcing themes of youthful energy and a "never give up" attitude.
2012 baseline film (pre-repositioning), for contrast: BestMediaInfo reported the original ambassador film was a 40-second TVC shot in Kuala Lumpur, created by agency 30 Seconds of Fame, built around an action chase sequence.
Beyond the ambassador films, exchange4media and afaqs! both report that the 2021 relaunch was supported by a defined set of digital-native assets and formats: an influencer challenge under the hashtag #ItsInMeChallenge, in which influencers challenged their followers to demonstrate "the Sparx in them"; influencer unboxing videos; behind-the-scenes/making-of content; and a "Shoe Shake Challenge," which afaqs! reported was framed to also encourage social-distancing behaviour, situating the campaign within the pandemic-era social context of its launch. FashionNetwork India additionally reported that the campaign was supported by billboard and newspaper advertising pan-India, alongside television and digital placements, and that Relaxo collaborated with "digital influencers from different fields" to extend reach.
A 2026 industry analysis by IIDE (a marketing education firm publishing case-study content, not an Relaxo-authored source) characterises Sparx's broader content approach as "largely video-led and distributed across social and marketplace placements," with branded hashtags and challenges used to boost sharing, and celebrity-led films distributed across both organic social feeds and marketplace ad slots though this characterisation should be read as third-party analytical commentary rather than a company-disclosed fact.
Positioning & Consumer Insight
The insight underlying "It's In Me," as articulated by Relaxo's own marketing executives, is that a youth audience responds less to product-led claims (comfort, durability, price-value) than to an aspirational, self-affirming message that positions the footwear as an enabler of a mindset already present in the wearer, rather than the source of the mindset. Sachin Chhabra, VP & Head of Marketing at Relaxo Footwears, was quoted by Mediabrief.com describing the platform as "encapsulating the vitality and enthusiasm of the younger generation," and by afaqs! as emphasising style, durability and comfort as supporting rather than central planks of the message.
The choice to retain Akshay Kumar across a rebranding of tone (rather than replace him with a younger face) is itself a documented strategic decision, explained candidly by Dua to Pitchonnet: he noted that although "Akshay now is reaching that kind of age," the brand's use of him works specifically because the campaign narrative transfers the challenge from Kumar to a younger co-protagonist within the film using Kumar as a symbol of enduring fitness and relevance ("if he can still be fit, we are trying to communicate... that they can be too") rather than as a literal peer of the target consumer. This is a distinctive piece of publicly disclosed strategic reasoning: ambassador continuity was treated as an asset to be reframed narratively, rather than a liability to be retired.
Gaurav Dua's framing to afaqs! that "having Superstar Akshay Kumar at the centre of this campaign ushers a new era of agility and comfort through Sparx's product that aren't bound to a single vector or audience" also signals an intent to widen the brand's addressable audience beyond a narrowly defined youth-male sports-footwear buyer, though no specific demographic segmentation data has been publicly disclosed.
Media & Channel Strategy
Relaxo's own disclosed statements indicate a deliberate, sequenced multi-channel strategy rather than simultaneous saturation. Per afaqs!, the 2021 relaunch was designed to premiere on digital platforms first, with television support to follow a reversal of the brand's traditional TV-first sequencing, justified explicitly on digital's growing reach among Indian youth audiences. FashionNetwork India separately confirmed a full-funnel channel mix for the same campaign wave: television, digital, billboard and newspaper advertising, deployed pan-India, alongside influencer partnerships spanning multiple content fields. No campaign-specific reach, impression, or engagement metrics have been publicly disclosed by Relaxo for any wave of the "It's In Me" campaign; where third-party sources (such as the IIDE case-study write-up) describe channel emphasis (e.g., Instagram, Facebook and YouTube as "core social engines"), these are analytical characterisations by an external commentator rather than company-confirmed figures, and are noted here only as such.
Business & Brand Outcomes
What is publicly documented is company-level and segment-level financial performance during the period in which the campaign has run. Relaxo's FY2023-24 Directors' Report shows consolidated revenue from operations of ₹2,914.06 crore, up 4.72% year-on-year, EBITDA of ₹406.59 crore (up from ₹335.78 crore), and net profit of ₹200.47 crore (up from ₹154.47 crore) an improvement across all three headline metrics during a year that fell within the campaign's active run. Equity research from Business Standard/YES Securities (August 2024) states that Sparx, together with Flite, contributes approximately 75% of Relaxo's total revenue, underscoring the brand's centrality to company performance, though this figure describes overall brand contribution rather than a campaign-attributable outcome. Separately, ICICI Direct's research notes recorded periods of revenue softness for Relaxo in FY2022-23 (e.g., an 8% YoY revenue decline in one reported quarter) attributed by the analysts to raw-material cost inflation and a GST rate increase affecting sub-₹1,000 footwear external market headwinds that are documented as affecting the broader business in the same period, though not linked by any source specifically to the marketing campaign's effectiveness.
Strategic Implications
Three elements of Relaxo's public disclosures around the Sparx repositioning carry broader strategic lessons applicable beyond this single case.
First, the decision to retain an ageing celebrity ambassador through a message-level repositioning rather than treating ambassador refresh and message refresh as a single bundled decision illustrates a distinct playbook: brand equity built into a long-tenured ambassador (Akshay Kumar had represented Sparx since 2012) can be preserved and repurposed as a narrative device (the mentor who "passes the spark" to a younger protagonist) even as the underlying brand promise shifts from product-functional claims to emotional/aspirational ones. This is a more capital-efficient path to repositioning than an ambassador change, provided the creative execution can plausibly reframe the ambassador's role.
Second, Relaxo's stated move to sequence digital before television for a value-segment, mass-market footwear brand is notable precisely because it runs counter to the conventional assumption that TV-first sequencing suits mass-reach categories. The company's own justification that its target youth audience's media consumption has migrated to OTT and digital news platforms indicates that channel sequencing decisions were being made on audience-behaviour grounds specific to the brand's segment (youth, digitally-native) rather than on category convention.
Third, the absence of any publicly disclosed campaign-specific performance metrics even as Relaxo continued to invest in successive "It's In Me" waves for at least three years is itself instructive for case analysis: it illustrates the common information asymmetry between what marketing organisations communicate externally about creative strategy and rationale (rich, quotable, consistent across years) and what they disclose about marketing ROI (largely absent from public record for a listed company that otherwise reports detailed segment financials). Analysts evaluating campaigns for FMCG/consumer brands in India frequently must infer effectiveness from aggregate financial performance and brand contribution share rather than from campaign-specific data, a constraint this case study has been deliberately transparent about rather than working around with unverified estimates.
Discussion Questions
Relaxo chose to retain Akshay Kumar as brand ambassador through a full repositioning of Sparx's core message, rather than replacing him with a younger face associated with the new "It's In Me" positioning. Under what conditions is retaining an incumbent ambassador through a message pivot the stronger strategic choice, and when would ambassador replacement be warranted instead?
Gaurav Dua justified a digital-first, TV-second launch sequence specifically on the grounds of youth media consumption patterns. What criteria should a marketing team use to decide channel sequencing (versus simultaneous multi-channel launch) for a mass-market brand targeting a youth segment?
Sparx and Flite together were reported to contribute roughly 75% of Relaxo's revenue. What are the strategic risks of a diversified manufacturer's revenue and margin profile being this concentrated in two brands, and how might this shape marketing investment prioritisation across the wider portfolio (including Relaxo and Bahamas)?
This case relies substantially on statements made by Relaxo's own marketing executives in trade press interviews, in the absence of disclosed campaign-performance metrics. What are the limitations of evaluating "brand-building" marketing campaigns primarily through executive narrative rather than independently verified outcome data, and how should an analyst account for this gap?
Relaxo operates in a market undergoing a structural shift from unorganised to organised/branded footwear, aided by regulatory changes such as GST rationalisation and BIS quality norms. How should a challenger or incumbent brand's youth-targeted emotional positioning strategy (like "It's In Me") differ from its category-level, industry-structure strategy (like leveraging BIS compliance or GST-driven formalisation)?
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