Beyond Beard Oil: Mannlich’s Pritam Kudev Bets on Men’s Overlooked Care Needs

A few months after Mannlich launched its hair-removal cream, founder Pritam Kudev received a call from a woman who wanted help understanding how to use it. The instructions were in English, and she needed someone to explain them. Kudev got on the phone, assuming initially that she was buying the product for her husband.

She was buying it for her son.

He had been bedridden for ten years following paralysis. For him, removing hair from intimate areas was not about appearance or grooming. It was a matter of comfort and hygiene. Trimmers and scissors, the alternatives available to him, left behind short, prickly hair that could become uncomfortable within a day or two. The hair-removal cream offered his mother a more convenient way to manage the problem.

It was not the sort of consumer Mannlich had necessarily imagined when developing the product. The brand was targeting men who were becoming more conscious of personal care, experimenting with grooming and looking for solutions to specific concerns. Yet the call revealed a larger market for products that addressed everyday problems, including those that had little to do with vanity.

"We are often thinking about Gen Z consumers and social-media trends, but this was a use case we had not anticipated," says Kudev.

It is an experience that captures the thinking behind Mannlich. Rather than build another men's grooming label around beards, fragrances and the idea of what makes a man attractive, the company wants to position itself around problems men have traditionally been less comfortable discussing.

The distinction is important in a market that has spent the past decade trying to persuade Indian men to take grooming seriously. The first wave of brands helped make beard oils, face washes and styling products acceptable purchases. But the next opportunity, believes Kudev, lies beyond basic grooming, in specialised skincare, intimate hygiene and products designed around particular needs.

A different kind of men's grooming brand

At 34, Kudev has been using personal-care products since his teenage years. An electrical and electronics engineering graduate with an MBA from IMT, he went on to work in marketing, with experience at organisations including Hindustan Unilever, State Bank of India and Indian Bank.

Entrepreneurship, however, had been on his mind for years. Before Mannlich, he experimented with an NGO, online content and community initiatives. One of these was Post 9 to 5, an offline community he started in Mumbai to help people find others with interests beyond their professional lives. The pandemic brought that experiment to a halt.

Mannlich began differently. Kudev worked on the business alongside his full-time job, funding it himself rather than immediately approaching investors. Even after the brand started gaining traction, he continued in employment for another year and a half. He wanted to be certain that the business could sustain itself without depending on an early funding round. He joined Mannlich full-time in October 2024.

The opportunity he identified was not simply that men needed more grooming products. It was that the existing market was built around a particular idea of the male consumer.

Brands such as Beardo and The Man Company helped create awareness by associating grooming with confidence, attractiveness and aspiration. That was useful when men were still being introduced to the category. But consumer behaviour has since evolved. Social media has made conversations around acne, pigmentation, sunscreen, skin texture, waxing and hair fall much more commonplace.

Men are increasingly looking for products that address these concerns rather than simply improve their appearance. Yet much of the specialised skincare market is served by unisex brands. Kudev estimates that women account for 60–70 per cent of the consumer base of several such brands, potentially influencing the preferences around which products are developed, from fragrance and texture to format.

Mannlich wants to build around the male consumer from the outset.

"We are not trying to sell men an identity. We want to address the gap between the products they currently use and products that are actually designed around their needs," he says.

The approach is reflected in the company's product decisions. Face wash, one of the easiest categories for a new personal-care brand to enter, is still absent from its portfolio. Kudev believes the market already has enough good options and that there is little reason to introduce another product simply to increase the number of SKUs.

Mannlich started with three intimate-care products, which remain its largest revenue contributors. It has subsequently expanded into body care and face care, taking its portfolio to ten products. Its offerings address concerns ranging from intimate hygiene and hair removal to chafing, body odour and tanning.

The strategy is closer to specialised skincare than the conventional men's grooming playbook. But it also presents a challenge: a brand that refuses to launch products merely to follow trends must continuously identify enough meaningful problems to sustain growth.

The economics of solving a problem

Mannlich's differentiation rests partly on its formulation strategy. It does not own manufacturing facilities, relying instead on third-party manufacturers in India. Its formulations, however, are developed with chemists in India and Germany, and the final formulations are owned by the company.

Kudev says the brand explored formulation partnerships in several countries, including South Korea, before settling on German expertise. Manufacturing in India allows it to combine that expertise with a more accessible price point. The company is also working towards patenting a particular combination of ingredients, although the patent has not yet been granted.

Its target is the mass-premium consumer, broadly between 18 and 34 years old. These consumers may aspire to use international personal-care brands but may be reluctant to spend ₹900–1,000 on an individual product. Mannlich wants to occupy the space between inexpensive mass-market products and expensive imported alternatives.

There is another assumption informing its product strategy. Kudev believes men are less inclined towards the kind of experimentation that has become common in women's beauty and skincare. The company interviewed more than 500 men across Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, and found that many preferred to continue using products that had worked for them since their teenage years.

"I do not see men buying ten lip balms in the next five to ten years," he says.

He expects the market to grow more through premiumisation, with consumers moving towards better formulations and higher-quality products, than through excessive consumption and constant experimentation.

This could give Mannlich an advantage if it succeeds in building a loyal customer base. But it also means that the company cannot depend on the conventional beauty industry's frequent product launches to stimulate demand. It will have to demonstrate that its existing products work, while finding new categories where the consumer has a genuine unmet need.

The brand's marketing strategy reflects this emphasis on efficacy. Around 30 per cent of its net revenue goes towards performance marketing on platforms such as Google and Meta. It also works with micro- and nano-influencers whose lifestyles make them credible advocates for particular products. Runners and gym-goers, for instance, are more relevant to an anti-chafing cream than influencers who simply feature products as part of paid collaborations.

The company also avoids exaggerated claims. Rather than promise dramatic changes in skin tone within a week, it sets longer expectations for results, particularly for concerns such as pigmentation, which can have multiple causes. Products are reformulated approximately every nine to ten months, with consumer feedback informing subsequent batches.

For a digital-first personal-care company, this is an attempt to make the product, rather than the advertising, the primary reason for repeat purchases.

Can quick commerce build a ₹100-crore brand?

Mannlich's distribution strategy is built around online consumption. Quick-commerce platforms account for the largest share of its revenue, followed by online marketplaces and its own website.

The consumer journey is fairly straightforward. Someone might discover the brand through an advertisement or marketplace listing, make an initial purchase and then use quick commerce for subsequent orders. The convenience of getting a personal-care product delivered in minutes is particularly relevant to products that consumers may need at short notice.

Offline retail is not an immediate priority. Kudev believes the economics of traditional retail may not be attractive enough at this stage, given the margins involved and the convenience that online channels already offer.

The strategy has helped the company build its business without the costs associated with a large physical distribution network. In FY24, Mannlich reported gross revenue of ₹1.3 crore, rising to ₹4.7 crore in FY25, according to figures shared by Kudev. The company also reported selling more than 100,000 units during this period.

It has since moved beyond bootstrapping. In March 2026, Mannlich raised $294,000 in a seed funding round led by BeyondSeed. Chandigarh Angels Network, Signal Ventures, Growth Sense and Growth91 participated, along with angel investors including Arjun Vaidya of Dr. Vaidya, Arush Chopra and Megha Sabhlok of Just Herbs, and Gaurav Kumar of Yubi.

The funding is intended to strengthen research and development and expand the company's capabilities in R&D and branding. For Kudev, who had initially wanted to demonstrate that he could build a business before seeking outside capital, the round marks a new phase.

The ambitions are considerably larger. Mannlich wants to reach an annual revenue run rate of ₹100 crore by March 2028, before eventually building a ₹500–600-crore business. The longer-term plan is to establish a national presence and then expand internationally.

Profitability remains central to that ambition. Kudev does not want the company to pursue growth at any cost, particularly by increasing marketing expenditure simply to inflate its top line. He believes a business with healthy margins and a sustainable bottom line is better equipped to withstand changing funding conditions.

His view of the competitive landscape is also revealing. He does not consider legacy men's grooming labels its closest competition. Instead, he looks at unisex, problem-oriented skincare brands such as Chemist at Play and Deconstruct. These companies are competing for consumers who are becoming more particular about ingredients, efficacy and the specific concerns a product addresses.

This puts Mannlich in an interesting position. It wants to own the male personal-care consumer, but its competitive set extends beyond brands that explicitly market themselves to men.

India's changing consumer behaviour offers some encouragement. NIQ's research on Gen Z and male grooming has pointed to growing interest among younger men in skincare, ingredients and self-care. The opportunity is no longer restricted to the traditional grooming kit. But the size of the addressable market for specialised men's personal care is a different question from the overall grooming market, and Mannlich will need to establish how much consumers are willing to spend on these products.

When personal care becomes something more

There is another dimension to the business that Kudev wants to develop. Through Mannline, Mannlich has partnered with Mpower and the Aditya Birla Foundation to provide a free, 24-hour mental-health helpline for men.

The thinking is that many men may struggle with mental-health concerns but remain reluctant to seek professional help. Mannlich has used its packaging as a point of access, placing a QR code and helpline details on its products. Consumers can use these to connect with mental-health professionals.

Kudev says more than 1,000 people have interacted with counsellors for over eight minutes since the initiative began. The service is intended to make support accessible to people who may otherwise be unable to afford counselling or may not know where to seek help.

It is an unusual initiative for a personal-care company, but it fits into the larger idea of building a brand around the problems men face rather than the image they are expected to project.

The mother's call about her paralysed son and the mental-health helpline may seem like very different stories. One concerns a practical problem of hygiene; the other addresses a more difficult conversation around emotional well-being. But both illustrate how a consumer brand can find relevance in needs that traditional grooming advertising rarely acknowledges.

That, ultimately, is the market Kudev wants Mannlich to occupy. He does not want consumers to think of the brand merely when they need a body wash that smells good. He wants it to come to mind when someone has a problem such as body acne and is looking for a solution.

The proposition is compelling, but the business test will be harder. Mannlich must establish that men will consistently spend on specialised personal care, that its formulations can stand apart from a growing field of skincare brands, and that its quick-commerce-led distribution can support a profitable business at scale.

Selling masculinity helped create India's men's grooming market. Mannlich is betting that solving men's problems can make it considerably bigger.