Once the leading kitchen mixer-grinder brand, Sumeet had disappeared from the market, thanks to distribution problems and wrangles over succession. Its management is now attempting a comeback, but will it succeed.

To build a successful brand and become the undisputed market leader is a tough job. An even tougher one is to revive a once-formidable brand whose strongest presence now is in the memory of the previous generation. Ajay Mathur should know this better than anyone else. The 55-year-old is the director of Sumeet Appliances and has taken it upon himself to revive the brand his father founded and built. The name Sumeet may not ring a bell now, but as an industry veteran succinctly puts it, what Dalda was to vanaspati ghee, Sumeet used to be to the mixer-grinder.

Sumeet has its origins in a challenge from a wife to her husband. “My mother had a Braun blender from Germany but the motor burnt out as it was not meant for the heavy-duty grinding Indian cooking calls for. Since there were no Braun service centres in India then, she told my father that if he really was an engineer, he should be able to repair it,” Mathur says. His father, Satya Prakash Mathur, did one better — he designed a mixie with a motor powerful enough to withstand the rigors of Indian grinding (a 500-600 watt motor, a unique L-shaped design, and a torque of 20,000 rpm that Mathur claims is comparable to an aircraft propeller were some of its attributes). Bolstered by the positive feedback from his wife and friends, Mathur Senior took permission from his bosses at Siemens to float a company in 1963 to manufacture the mixies. Power Company Appliances, registered in the name of his wife, Madhuri. Contrary to popular perception, Sumeet (meaning good friend in Hindi) was a Mumbai brand, and not a South Indian one. Armed with its USP, a motor that would not burn even with the toughest grinding, and complemented by after-sales service and a reputation for being able to last up to 20 years, Sumeet quickly became a household name.

When Mathur says the brand ushered a revolution in the Indian kitchen, he is not far from the truth, something even rivals acknowledge. Despite the entry of many me-too brands and the market being fragmented, Sumeet was able to hold on to its dominant position even up to the ’90s. At its peak in the ’80s, Sumeet was selling around 60,000 machines a month, and enjoyed a market share of 43 per cent, says Mathur. But then, the enviable success story began to unravel. And this is where the narrative diverges.

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According to Mathur, the primary reason we no longer see Sumeet on store shelves even in former strongholds such as Maharashtra and south India is the efforts of a distributor cartel in the South that refused to stock the machines. “If there is a villain in the Sumeet story, it’s the big distributors in the South who were also retailers. If other dealers asked for 20 mixies, these distributors would give them five,” he says. B A Srinivasa, the CEO of Viveks, one of the largest retailers in south India with 55 stores and a turnover of Rs 400 crore, flatly denies this. “We were always looking out for and nourishing the brand; that’s the kind of excellent relationship we had with its proprietors,” says Srinivasa who attributes the decline to conflicts within the family and the brand’s inability to adapt to an evolving market, the same reasons put forward by brand consultants and other industry players.

Mathur does not deny there was turmoil in the family. “There was no proper succession planning,” is how he puts it. Two companies made Sumeet Appliances: Power Control Appliances and Sumeet Machines (now called Sumeet Appliances). Mathur’s brother, Vivek, shifted base to Chennai in the mid-’80s and joined forces with their maternal uncle. Power Control Appliances, the company registered in the name of Madhuri Mathur and controlled by her brother and younger son, took Maharashtra-based Sumeet Machines to court over the right to use the brand name Sumeet and, reportedly, even sent feelers to rivals to sell the company. The courts, in the early ’90s, held that there could be only one proprietor of a trademark. Mathur says Sumeet Appliances has now become the sole owner of the Sumeet trademark.

But while the Mathurs were busy wrangling in court and outside, the mixer-grinder market outside was changing. Aggressive rivals, such as Maharaja and Bajaj in the North and West, and Preethi in the South, began offering similar and more advanced products, and soon started to gain traction.

Preethi, the mixer-grinder brand of the Chennai-based Maya Appliances, started by a branch of the TTK family in 1978, was able to build on its strengths, and by the early 2000s, emerged as one of the highest-selling mixer-grinders. It now claims to be the market leader with annual sales of 1.3 million units, in a heavily fragmented market estimated to be Rs 1,000 crore with sales between 8 and 10 million units. In January last year, Maya Appliances was bought over by Philips. This is likely to help Preethi enter new markets like the North and Philips gain dominance in the mid and lower-range price points as well as a significant presence in the southern markets. Brands like Havells have also entered the fray, recently.

Simultaneously, consumer preferences and lifestyles have changed. While south Indian households might still need to grind chutneys for breakfast, they can now do it in sleek machines, available in an array of options. And with customers constantly upgrading appliances, even Sumeet mixers’ ability to last 20 years is not as big an advantage now as it used to be two decades ago.

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It is to this difficult market that Mathur now plans to stage a comeback. He acknowledges it is a daunting task (to put it mildly), considering Sumeet’s sales is now 10,000-12,000 a month (120,000 to 144,000 a year), including annual sales of 40,000 to army canteens, and restricted to the western Maharashtra market. First up is scaling up production. “I have got control of our factory in Nashik now, the biggest appliance factory in India, which should help us reach an output of 150,000 units a month in 2014.” Mathur says the disadvantage of Sumeet’s factory being located in Maharashtra, (most rivals have set up manufacturing plants in Uttarakhand and Himachal for the sizeable tax exemptions on offer) will be offset by the fact that the mixer will not be positioned at the lower end of the market (read cheaper). Another challenge, which he himself points out, is the number of duplicates in the market.

Sumeet mixer-grinder, Mathur adds, has recently re-entered the Hyderabad and coastal Andhra markets, and Mathur plans to launch four models in Chennai in the next couple of months. The company is also in talks with a major national consumer appliances retailer to expand its reach beyond distributors and standalone retailers, and a nation-wide ad campaign is planned for the middle of this year. Mathur is also trying to register the brand in Sri Lanka, while his sister and son are setting up a company in Canada to establish the brand in the North American markets.

But despite its best efforts, can a brand that consumers may no longer be familiar with revive itself? “If C K Birla were to relaunch the Ambassador now, would customers be queueing up for it?” is how a senior executive in a rival firm, who requests not to be named, views the strategy.

Pranesh Misra, chairman and managing director of Brandscapes Worldwide, puts it differently but is of a similar opinion. Historically, hardly any brand has been able script a successful comeback of the sort Sumeet is aiming for and this is a category that’s driven by the latest technology, he says. “Also, it is saddled with an Indian name when the consumer goods market is dominated by multinational corporations, and is a brand that has been left behind.” Misra even goes so far as to say it might be better to launch a new brand than revive the old one. (Incidentally, Misra too was once a Sumeet customer, and owned both a mixer-grinder and washing machine.)

Others are slightly more optimistic. “There’s always room for a strong brand like Sumeet, though the company will have to get many things right,” says Francis Xavier, CEO of the 25-year-old Chennai-based firm Francis Kanoi Market Research which tracks the kitchen appliances sector. “This is a market where the top three brands have sales of around 1.5 million, while the rest is split among an estimated 200 local brands. It would be possible for a brand like Sumeet to corner a market share of up to 5 per cent but going beyond that would be very tough,” says Xavier.

Mathur, though, is determined to go ahead. “I may be 55 but I’m excited about our plans. And I will not have lived if I don’t attempt this now — I feel responsible.”