Taking Fresh Guard

Mitashi, a homegrown consumer electronics brand, has used cricket and football to grow at a brisk clip over the last decade

- Rajiv Singh

Test cricket teaches patience. “It helps you play a long innings,” says Rakesh Dugar. As chairman and managing director of homegrown consumer electronics brand Mitashi, Dugar’s journey in entrepreneurship has been a long one too. In 1991, he cofounded Maze Marketing—a video game console distribution company— with friend Hasmukh Gada out of the Ghatkopar suburb in Mumbai. The company grew at a sedate pace; it was a decade before it reached 56.83 crore revenue in 2010-11. “The pace was modest,” says Dugar, who renamed Maze as Mitashi in 1998.

Mitashi, Dugar explains, has always been billed as an underdog. The inspiration behind its Japanese name was from the Land of Rising Sun: Dugar was distributor for video game console brand Sega between 1994 and 1998, before Mitashi was launched. He was impressed with the company’s ideology of ‘slow and steady’ growth. “They [the Japanese] epitomise patience,” he says.

Ironically, by 2010, almost 12 years after the company was rebranded, Dugar found himself running out of patience. The tag of being a kids’ product brand was not helping the company graduate into the Big Boys’ club. From being just video game console distributors, they had branched out into selling electronic products. The company had rolled out audio-visual products such as DVDs and home theatres in 2004 and had followed it up with MP3 players the next year. But even as television sets were becoming their biggest ticket item, Dugar felt the X-factor was missing.

The word-of-mouth mode of growth had reached its limit, and other marketing strategies like below the line and print were not helping either. Cricket, more specifically the Indian Premier League (IPL), Dugar reasoned, might give the brand more visibility and a new lease of life.