From ₹50,000 to ₹150 crore: the making of Himanshu Chadha's Nimson International

Himanshu Chadha, founder of Nimson International, grew up watching his mother struggle with oily skin and imported creams that promised to fix it. Those products cost more than her family could spare. His father spent 25 years at Godrej before taking voluntary retirement, and the household was supported by his mother’s salary as a government school teacher. That gap between what people needed and what they could afford stayed with him through school.

He studied chemical engineering at IIT Delhi, getting in on his second attempt. While classmates planned careers leading to graduate school in America, Chadha considered what his parents had sacrificed. Watching friends enter well-paid jobs while he had nothing to show for four years of hard work left him frustrated, he admits. But he chose to use that frustration as motivation. In 1997, with no internet and only a few expensive textbooks on formulation science in the IIT library, he started Nimson with ₹50,000 and a plan to manufacture white petroleum jelly.

A season too late

The timing went wrong immediately. Winter had nearly passed by the time his formulation was ready, and demand for petroleum jelly had dried up. Nobody would take the stock even for free. Chadha was left with an unsold batch and a hard lesson: a good product means nothing without the right market at the right moment. He later recognised this as product-market fit, though he had no name for it at the time. The takeaway was clear: timing matters as much as formulation. He had never heard of terms like TAM, SAM, or SOM, which a group like ASCENT could have introduced years earlier.

What rescued the business was a gap he spotted in the sachet market. In the late 1990s, no small manufacturer sold shampoo, hair oil, face cream, or detergent in one- and two-rupee packs. This format lets first-time buyers try a product before committing to a full bottle. Chadha launched his first brand as a shampoo sachet, and it worked. He grew that single machine into 23 or 24 machines within about a year and a half. He expanded into hair oil, face creams, and detergent powders in sachet form. A larger factory followed in Himachal Pradesh, employing more than 50 people as the business grew into a structured pan-India operation.

Success brought its own strain. Chadha became a workaholic almost without noticing, working 18 to 20 hours a day and sleeping at the factory instead of going home. He carried two mobile phones that never stopped ringing, fielding calls on decisions as small as which vendor should get a purchase order. The pressure to get everything right came with a growing fear of loss because even a minor misstep could unsettle the whole business. His weight climbed to 120 kg, and tests showed high blood sugar, hypertension, and chest pain. Running became his outlet, the only time in the day that belonged to him alone.

Walking together

A chance meeting in Mumbai introduced him to ASCENT, and he was enrolled in its All India chapter, a peer group drawing entrepreneurs from cities including Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad, across manufacturing and services alike. Discussions introduced him to delegation, checklists, production management systems and ERPs, ideas he says no book had ever taught him. Hearing how others in the group solved similar problems gave him what he calls golden nuggets he could not have found elsewhere. The takeaway, he says, was to build leadership around shared learning and delegated responsibility. He began applying them inside Nimson, building a leadership layer empowered to make its own decisions, with the explicit goal of creating, in his words, “a clone of Himanshu in every department.”

Nimson today makes over 500 SKUs across more than 1,000 formulations, sells across every PIN code in India and exports abroad. Roughly 70 per cent of its workforce is women, and the company works with communities of women farmers who supply raw herbs and also funds schooling for their children. Chadha speaks of wanting to give women in his organisation the same sense of identity he wants for his own family.

Chadha sums up what changed his approach in a line he often returns to: if you want to walk fast, walk alone; if you want to walk far, walk together. He describes his journey as a mix of failure and extreme success and says the instinct to keep moving through setbacks, guided by what he calls “sabr and shukr”, patience and gratitude, has mattered more than any single decision. For a business, he wants to outlast him by building on an affordable, authentic product for the masses, which has become the point.

Note to Readers: Changemakers of Bharat is an editorial partnership between ASCENT Foundation and LiveMint.