Story of Fevicol Man – Balvant Parekh
We all know Elon Musk.
We all know Bill Gates.
We also know who was Steve Jobs.
But do we know who is Balvant Parekh?
Try to remember the funniest and most creative TV ads which you have ever seen. Remember Fevicol? Balvant Parekh, was the founder of Fevicol. Born in 1925, when India was struggling for freedom, Mr. Parekh gave up on studies and joined the freedom movement. Later he joined college and completed his law but never started practice. He then started working as a peon to take care of his family and wife.
In 1954, Parekh and his brother, Sushil, started trading and manufacturing dye and industrial chemicals named Parekh Dyechem Industries.
One day, Mr. Parekh saw how carpenters were using animal fat to join wood. There wasn’t any adhesive in the country and thats when he decided to come up with an idea of adhesive.
Fate happened and Balvant had to visit Germany for a month. He started buying more stocks of a German firm, Fedco, with which he had a fifty per cent partnership. He made a glue named Favicol. The suffix -col is a German word which means anything which bonds two things. In 1959, firm was renamed to Pidilite Industries and manufacturing just a single product, Fevicol.
From just a single product, Pidilite now manufactures products across verticals such as art materials and stationery; food and fabric care; car products, adhesives, and sealants; and speciality industrial products like adhesives, pigments; textile resins, leather chemicals, and construction chemicals. With a fortune of $1.36 billion, Balvant featured at Number 45 on Forbes Asia’s India Rich List 2013.
He passed away in January 2013. He was 88. From just one office in Mumbai, Balvant’s Pidilite now has 14 overseas subsidiaries. The company has factories in the US, Thailand, Dubai, Egypt and Bangladesh. They also have a research center in Singapore.
What an inspiring story. Yet!! We want to look at west if we want to find business minds.
