Leadership

Board of directors

• Ratan Behari Agrawal

  Founder, RB Colour

  Came into a small works at Hathras that ground hing, colour and gulal, and spent the next forty years asking a question nobody in the trade was asking: what if the pack were better, and what if the raw material were bought where it grows rather than off the domestic market? Hing began arriving from Afghanistan, the packaging was redrawn, and his initials went on the colour company. RB Colour — the bird on the pack — became the name a dealer in a town he had never visited would ask for by name. That is what a brand is, and he built it one relationship at a time.

• Manu Garg

  Director

  Grew up inside the colour season and took Cock Brand colour and gulal, and Gopal and Baby hing, to a height the Hathras units had not reached before. A festival business lives or dies on distribution — a whole year of demand arrives in a fortnight, and the goods have to already be on the shelf when it does — so he spent those years on product and on dealers in equal measure. The network he built now runs past ten thousand names. His measure of a good year has never been tonnage; it is whether the shop that ordered last Holi ordered again.

• Shantanu Garg

  Director

  Opened a second shelf. The Mevabite dry fruit range started at the Delhi unit in pack formats built for a completely different kind of shop from the one that buys gulal by the sack, and hing distribution widened alongside it. He leads the group's technology and digital work on a straightforward conviction: an Indian manufacturer should be findable by a buyer in another country directly, on its own name, without an agent standing in between and taking the relationship with him.

• Kartikey Garg

  Director

  Pointed the trade both ways across the border — dry fruit imported, colour and gulal exported — and tightened quality control in bulk production to match what a foreign buyer's inspection actually asks for. He put the group's full range into a mobile application so an order could be placed from a phone rather than a phone call. The export book began with single pallets and buyers who had never heard of Hathras; it now reaches more than ten countries.

• Sagar Ratan Garg

  Director

  Joined at twenty-two and went straight at the thing family businesses usually leave alone: the structure itself. The family's companies were restructured as a conglomerate and responsibility for each part was written down rather than understood, which is unglamorous work and the reason the rest of it can scale. He runs the digital and online side, and states the ambition plainly — that the answer to "where are the world's toys made" should be India, and that a factory in Faridabad moulding to ASTM and EN-71 is one of the reasons it will be. Four generations got the family from a shop to a manufacturer. The job now is to get an Indian manufacturer onto the shelf of every market that has a festival, and every market that does not.