I often thought of quitting and was starting to question

By Pranbihanga Borpuzari

In 1999, my children got jaundice after drinking contaminated water. I never used a water purifier before and suddenly felt the need to have one. I started researching and found that only UV water purifiers were available in the market. UV does not remove the particles dissolved in water. After extensive research I figured out that the process of reverse osmosis (RO) could tackle the problem. I decided to design a purifier for my house and imported a few components like the membrane and a pump from the US. It took me about three months but the results of my design were very good and it struck me that what is good for me would be good for everyone else in the country. Thus the idea of Kent RO was born.

Early days
I graduated from IIT Kanpur in 1975 and subsequently joined Indian Institute of Petroleum in Dehradun. Passing out in 1977, I joined Indian Oil Corporation as an engineer and worked on conservation of fuel. My job involved traveling to different industries and educating people on the methods of saving oil.

In 1988, I wanted to do something of my own-I wanted to start a business which would work in the field of conservation of oil. I started a company called SS Engineering, which developed products to save oil. Investing `20,000 from my personal savings, I started the business from my backyard. Growth was good along with profitability, and things were moving absolutely fine with a turnover of about `4 crore. The company is functional even today and employs about 40 people.

Heady mix
Oil and water do not mix and the second business I embarked upon was more by accident after my children fell ill. Spurred by the product I had designed for my house, I decided to manufacture and market it for consumers and get into the water purification business. People called me crazy since the cost of these purifiers were so high that it was a given that no one would buy it. A purifier came for about `20,000 while a gravity purifier was available for not more than `4,000. However, there were some who bought the product and the feedback I got was very positive. It helped reduce abdominal pains in many cases while some even claimed to have seen improvements in blood pressure. Having said that, the first month I hardly sold two units and in the first year of operations we hardly did a few lakh of sales. The going was much tougher than I had anticipated it to be.

Power to go on
I often thought of quitting and was starting to question the relevance of the product. However, at the same time, I had the will to carry on and persevere since I believed that the product could work if I gave it enough time. I named my company Kent RO Systems with the strong belief that RO was the system which would differentiate us in the market.

Mine was an industrial product manufacturing company which was never in the consumer space. Here I was trying to sell a product to consumers and, very frankly, had little idea about how to go about it. On the other hand, my competitor was almost synonymous with water purifiers and it was proving extremely difficult. But what worked was that the people who used it would recommend it to friends and family and slowly, the word spread. Soon we started doing some exhibitions and also came out with small advertisements across publications. Progress was slow but I was confident.

The next stage
I am a scientist and a keen observer of things. The first product that we made was an under-the-counter purifier where the product had to be installed below a sink and was very heavy. It was a western approach where they never put anything on the wall but believe in concealing the products. My initial product was similar but I realized it will not work in India. In India, people do not like dry kitchens but prefer wet ones. After every round of cooking, people generally prefer to wash or wipe their counters. Anything put on the counter or under the counter would not work.

Mine was the first RO company in the world to develop a product which could be mounted on the wall which suited Indian customers well. This made it a lot easier to sell the product. The early products, however, were not made of plastic and continued to be made of stainless steel.

Over the next two years I discovered another problem. There are two types of impurities in water-one which gets dissolved and one which does not. Hard water with calcium and magnesium is very common and these are dissolved impurities of water.

One disadvantage with the RO purifier was that while removing dissolved impurities, it also removed essential minerals. In 2005, I came out with Mineral RO, which would help keep the essential minerals intact and purify the water. We have the patent for this innovation.

Reaching out
By 2006 I realized that to make the product work, it was essential to get into serious advertising and marketing. We needed a well-known, popular person who was also a mother, to advertise the product. That is when we zeroed in on film actor Hema Malini. By the year-end, we expanded to other metros and the mass media campaign worked. The whole country became familiar with Kent as a brand and we clocked revenues of `30 crore that year. Since then we have been growing every year at 30-40 percent. I feel we will continue to grow at this pace for a few years to come.

Over the years we have started making UV purifiers and gravity purifiers for rural India, which faces acute shortage of electricity. ROs contribute about 85 percent of the revenue but other segments are also doing well. Kent has also come up with a vegetable purifier, a water softener for washing machines and air purifiers. We have not touched even one percent of the population with our RO and the opportunity for us is huge as human beings continue to contaminate water sources.

We are closing the year with Rs. 450 crore in revenues and are present across most of the 600 districts in the country. My efforts have certainly not watered down.

As told to Pranbihanga Borpuzari

> Entrepreneur India April 2013
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