Seventy-five years of colour

Shyam Behari ji and Ratan Behari ji entered with ideas the trade had not seen. Packaging styles were redrawn, materials changed on the back of the best technology then available, and the hing was bought where it grows — imported directly from Afghanistan and other countries rather than taken off the domestic market. Buying at source is a decision about consistency before it is a decision about cost: it is the only way to know what is in every sack.

Ratan Behari ji's initials went on the colour company. RB Colour, sold under the bird on the pack, is the name Indian trade has used ever since: Cock Brand.

Manu Garg took Cock Brand colour and gulal, and Gopal and Baby hing, to a height they had not reached before across the Hathras units — product development and dealer relationships in equal measure. A festival business lives or dies on distribution, because the entire year's demand arrives in a fortnight and the goods have to already be on the shelf when it does.

The network built in those years now runs past ten thousand names, and it is the reason a new product from this company reaches an Indian shop in one season rather than three.

Shantanu Garg started the Mevabite dry fruit range at the Delhi unit, in pack formats built for a different kind of shop from the one that buys gulal by the sack, and widened hing distribution alongside it. Two businesses sharing a family, a discipline and nothing at all on the shelf.

Kartikey Garg then pointed the trade both ways across the border: dry fruit imported, colour and gulal exported, with quality control in bulk production tightened to match what a foreign buyer's inspection asks for. The group's full range went into a mobile application in the same period — every item the family makes, orderable from a phone.

Sagar Ratan Garg joined at twenty-two and put enterprise planning to work on the structure itself: the family's companies restructured as a conglomerate, and responsibility for each part written down rather than understood. Digital marketing and the online platforms followed — the same goods, in the places a buyer now looks first.

Garg Global Innovative Limited is the manufacturing that came out of that. It runs three brands, and it sells the capacity of the same factory to buyers who arrive with a design of their own.