I have always been a fan of soaps, and have written about multiple brands of soaps in the past.
One brand, besides Cinthol Red, that I keep going back to, every few months, is Aramusk. For the longest time, I was fascinated with the fact that it was the only soap in India that had a small sticker on the soap!
When I was younger, I used to be enamored by this sticker 🙂 I used to assume that the sticker seals the scent of the soap and tried to keep it intact as much as possible, using only the other side. And then I realized that it could possibly be a way to keep the soap dry in a soapbox/dish – you keep the sticker-side down so that the soap remains dry.
I even . It was a hand-written letter (those were the days) and I asked them why they do not have a musk variant in Cinthol! I remember mentioning in my letter that Aramusk was the only musk soap in India and Cinthol could easily do with a musk variant!
Over the years, I have also noticed the Aramusk brand moving hands. The brand was first owned by Calcutta Chemicals, and then sold to Henkel. Mumbai-based VVF (The Vegetable Vitamin Foods Company Pvt. Ltd., now known as VVF ltd., founded in 1939 by Godrej Pallonji Joshi) bought it from Henkel in 2010, even as Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail was also vying for it!
Finally, in 2011, Wipro Consumer Care acquired the brand from VVF and has been the owner since then.
Wipro has been threatening to do something about the brand frequently. They added a deo under the brand and in 2019, .
Well, it was always a male grooming brand, to begin with, but if they meant they will do something about letting more men know about the brand, there are no indications about that in the market… yet.
Amidst this dismal scenario (for the brand), I stumbled upon ‘Aramusk Force’ at a nearby MK Retail store!
The soap itself is fantastic! Classy fragrance and elegant packing too. No sticker on the soap, though 🙂 The package design could have been better since there’s a big black blob placed on a blue box unimaginatively.
The interesting thing about it is that there is no trace of this soap online. A Google search throws up nothing at all about it. Even a Google Images search doesn’t throw up even one photo or listing of the product.
Aramusk used to have a website – aramusk dot com, but it is defunct now. The URL itself seems to have available for purchase too!!
Wipro’s website makes a of the brand, but it doesn’t include this variant.
The Facebook page’s last update was on !
The last TV/video campaign, at least as per YouTube, was for the deo, in 2016!
The Aramusk Force pack says the packing date is December 2019. We’re in March 2020, today. Going by the quality of the product, I think it deserves a decent enough marketing campaign. This is a good brand and has decent-enough equity in the market.
But, like in the case of ITC B-natural’s one variant that has no mention anywhere on the internet including on ITC and B-natural’s own websites, Aramusk’s new variant seems completely absent anywhere except the stores.
Is this new variant that is being test-launched only in Bengaluru? Even then, a basic mention of it somewhere online to trace it back to the brand could be useful.
With summer approaching, I do hope Wipro has some plans for this deservedly good variant from Aramusk.