From KT Professional to KT Men and KT Kids: How Ccigmaa Is Building a Multi-Brand Personal-Care Business
Mumbai-based Ccigmaa Lifestyle has expanded from a salon-focused haircare business into men's grooming, children's personal care and skincare, following the disruption caused by the pandemic.
- Nov 6, 2026,
- Updated Nov 6, 2026 5:40 PM IST
Personal care company Ccigmaa Lifestyle builds its products around a single scientific premise, that hair and water composition change meaningfully every 100 kilometres or so across India, so a formulation built for one region routinely underperforms in another. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Mumbai, the company's first brand, KT Professional, was built specifically for salons and the stylists inside them, on a bet that a stylist's own recommendation would do more work than any advertisement, in service of founder Dhruv Sayani's stated ambition to inspire "millions of minds" through Indian-made personal care. That bet was still largely untested at scale when, in March 2020, every salon that stocked Sayani's products shut in the same week, not gradually, the way these disruptions usually spread elsewhere, but all of them, across the country, with no date attached to when any might open again.
Four years earlier, Sayani had built his entire company on the opposite assumption, that a hairstylist telling a client to try something works better than any advertisement ever could. KT Professional had grown to more than 27,000 salons across 86 cities almost entirely on that logic, one relationship at a time, with barely a retail shelf or a website order anywhere in the mix. When the salons went dark, so did the only channel the business had ever seriously depended on.
None of that started as an obvious bet. Sayani has said he tested roughly sixty formulations before deciding only three or four were good enough to sell, and spent months sending people into salons across the country because, in his words, a single salon sees at least thirty different hair types in a day. That is a slow, expensive way to build a shampoo brand in a market where most competitors were happy to import a formula and slap a new label on it. It is also, in hindsight, the same instinct that shows up later in how carefully each new brand under Ccigmaa gets built before it is allowed to launch.
Sayani has talked about that stretch plainly, without dressing it up as a strategic move he saw coming. "The impact in 2020 was large across the salon sector," he has said, "but our D2C presence helped it keep revenues flowing during 2020 and 2021." That online presence, by his own account, was thin before the pandemic forced the issue, something closer to an afterthought than a real second engine. It became one because there was no other option left standing.
The business still leans on salons more than on anything else, and Sayani is unambiguous about why: a product's physical presence, the "touch and feel" of it in his own words, earns a kind of loyalty a screen cannot fake. What actually changed after 2020 is the ratio sitting underneath that belief. Revenue today splits roughly 60% salons, 20% offline retail and 20% e-commerce, a number Sayani states plainly rather than treats as something to explain away. Three years earlier, that last slice barely registered.
That same stretch is where the logic for three more brands instead of one deeper one starts to make sense. Sayani has talked about the real risk being a good year, not a bad one, the kind of run that quietly convinces a company that no other bad year is ever coming and stops people asking what might break next. A business built on one channel, one brand and one audience found out in 2020 exactly what that comfort costs. KT Men, a children's line and, since this July, a skincare brand called KT Derma, read as much like an answer to that lesson as a growth plan.
They are not chasing the same buyer, either. The men's grooming brand spent its first year on two sports bets that had almost nothing in common with each other, an IPL partnership with Mumbai Indians and Royal Challengers Bengaluru built purely for household reach, followed months later by a tie-up with the Argentina Football Association around Lionel Messi, Julian Alvarez and Enzo Fernandez, aimed at a younger, more aspirational buyer and timed to the World Cup. Reach first. Aspiration second. Run in that order on purpose.
The children's brand works off a completely different kind of psychology, and it is worth taking seriously rather than filed away as a licensing gimmick. Research from the venture firm Fireside Ventures describes today's teenagers as something close to a reverse generation inside Indian households, parents increasingly validating what they buy for a child based on what that child has already noticed on Instagram, on YouTube, through a friend's phone, rather than the other way around. A separate study from 3one4 Capital found that Indian parents who actively engage with content about a product buy it more than twice as often as parents who do not, and describe children now as something closer to curated extensions of a family's own lifestyle than dependents simply being provided for. Licensing SpongeBob, then Peppa Pig fifteen months later, is doing more work than a cartoon usually gets credit for, it is riding exactly how a parent in 2026 actually decides what goes into a child's bathroom, a decision that looks almost nothing like the one their own parents made a generation earlier.
KT Derma skipped both sport and licensing for a more clinical pitch, built around sun protection, acne and skin-barrier concerns, the kind of
category where an outside litmus test matters more than a tagline. RetailIntel, a retail-intelligence firm with no stake in how any of this turns out, has put a specific standard on the table for when a shared name like this one is actually earned: separate lines should exist, in its own words, only where "formulations, routines and retail placement are genuinely differentiated." That is not a low bar, and Ccigmaa does not get to grade its own homework on it.
Four categories in a decade, the last two barely four months apart, is not a leisurely pace by anyone's measure. Sayani has talked about wanting to inspire, in his own words, "millions of minds" over the next ten years, the kind of line that is easy to say once and much harder to keep meaning specifically, year after year. The salons that reopened after 2021 came back to a brand they already trusted before the shutdown. Whether the parents buying into the children's brand today, or whoever eventually buys whatever follows the skincare line, feel that same way five years from now is a question no annual report is going to settle. Sayani has been sitting with a version of it, more or less quietly, since the week every one of his customers went dark at once, and if he has a confident answer yet, he has not said so out loud.
Personal care company Ccigmaa Lifestyle builds its products around a single scientific premise, that hair and water composition change meaningfully every 100 kilometres or so across India, so a formulation built for one region routinely underperforms in another. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Mumbai, the company's first brand, KT Professional, was built specifically for salons and the stylists inside them, on a bet that a stylist's own recommendation would do more work than any advertisement, in service of founder Dhruv Sayani's stated ambition to inspire "millions of minds" through Indian-made personal care. That bet was still largely untested at scale when, in March 2020, every salon that stocked Sayani's products shut in the same week, not gradually, the way these disruptions usually spread elsewhere, but all of them, across the country, with no date attached to when any might open again.
Four years earlier, Sayani had built his entire company on the opposite assumption, that a hairstylist telling a client to try something works better than any advertisement ever could. KT Professional had grown to more than 27,000 salons across 86 cities almost entirely on that logic, one relationship at a time, with barely a retail shelf or a website order anywhere in the mix. When the salons went dark, so did the only channel the business had ever seriously depended on.
None of that started as an obvious bet. Sayani has said he tested roughly sixty formulations before deciding only three or four were good enough to sell, and spent months sending people into salons across the country because, in his words, a single salon sees at least thirty different hair types in a day. That is a slow, expensive way to build a shampoo brand in a market where most competitors were happy to import a formula and slap a new label on it. It is also, in hindsight, the same instinct that shows up later in how carefully each new brand under Ccigmaa gets built before it is allowed to launch.
Sayani has talked about that stretch plainly, without dressing it up as a strategic move he saw coming. "The impact in 2020 was large across the salon sector," he has said, "but our D2C presence helped it keep revenues flowing during 2020 and 2021." That online presence, by his own account, was thin before the pandemic forced the issue, something closer to an afterthought than a real second engine. It became one because there was no other option left standing.
The business still leans on salons more than on anything else, and Sayani is unambiguous about why: a product's physical presence, the "touch and feel" of it in his own words, earns a kind of loyalty a screen cannot fake. What actually changed after 2020 is the ratio sitting underneath that belief. Revenue today splits roughly 60% salons, 20% offline retail and 20% e-commerce, a number Sayani states plainly rather than treats as something to explain away. Three years earlier, that last slice barely registered.
That same stretch is where the logic for three more brands instead of one deeper one starts to make sense. Sayani has talked about the real risk being a good year, not a bad one, the kind of run that quietly convinces a company that no other bad year is ever coming and stops people asking what might break next. A business built on one channel, one brand and one audience found out in 2020 exactly what that comfort costs. KT Men, a children's line and, since this July, a skincare brand called KT Derma, read as much like an answer to that lesson as a growth plan.
They are not chasing the same buyer, either. The men's grooming brand spent its first year on two sports bets that had almost nothing in common with each other, an IPL partnership with Mumbai Indians and Royal Challengers Bengaluru built purely for household reach, followed months later by a tie-up with the Argentina Football Association around Lionel Messi, Julian Alvarez and Enzo Fernandez, aimed at a younger, more aspirational buyer and timed to the World Cup. Reach first. Aspiration second. Run in that order on purpose.
The children's brand works off a completely different kind of psychology, and it is worth taking seriously rather than filed away as a licensing gimmick. Research from the venture firm Fireside Ventures describes today's teenagers as something close to a reverse generation inside Indian households, parents increasingly validating what they buy for a child based on what that child has already noticed on Instagram, on YouTube, through a friend's phone, rather than the other way around. A separate study from 3one4 Capital found that Indian parents who actively engage with content about a product buy it more than twice as often as parents who do not, and describe children now as something closer to curated extensions of a family's own lifestyle than dependents simply being provided for. Licensing SpongeBob, then Peppa Pig fifteen months later, is doing more work than a cartoon usually gets credit for, it is riding exactly how a parent in 2026 actually decides what goes into a child's bathroom, a decision that looks almost nothing like the one their own parents made a generation earlier.
KT Derma skipped both sport and licensing for a more clinical pitch, built around sun protection, acne and skin-barrier concerns, the kind of
category where an outside litmus test matters more than a tagline. RetailIntel, a retail-intelligence firm with no stake in how any of this turns out, has put a specific standard on the table for when a shared name like this one is actually earned: separate lines should exist, in its own words, only where "formulations, routines and retail placement are genuinely differentiated." That is not a low bar, and Ccigmaa does not get to grade its own homework on it.
Four categories in a decade, the last two barely four months apart, is not a leisurely pace by anyone's measure. Sayani has talked about wanting to inspire, in his own words, "millions of minds" over the next ten years, the kind of line that is easy to say once and much harder to keep meaning specifically, year after year. The salons that reopened after 2021 came back to a brand they already trusted before the shutdown. Whether the parents buying into the children's brand today, or whoever eventually buys whatever follows the skincare line, feel that same way five years from now is a question no annual report is going to settle. Sayani has been sitting with a version of it, more or less quietly, since the week every one of his customers went dark at once, and if he has a confident answer yet, he has not said so out loud.