Personal Branding Lessons From Jyothy Labs
- Kaushik Bose
- 23 hours ago
- 4 min read
There are quiet personal branding lessons buried inside a business story that made headlines this week. Jyothy Labs, the company behind Ujala and Exo, just lost the rights to Pril and Fa. German giant Henkel AG decided not to renew its licensing agreements for both brands after May 31, 2026. But this can happen to each & every one of us - whether we are in a corporate or even have our own company (remember Steve Jobs!)
Before we dig into the personal branding lessons, here's the story. Jyothy's stock fell over 11% in a single session on the news - brutal for a company that had already lost more than 55% from its all-time peak. Jyothy Labs spent 15 years building Pril into a premium urban dishwash brand. They poured money into advertising, expanded distribution aggressively, scaled operations across 23 manufacturing plants, and turned what was once a struggling product into a category leader with 13% market share in liquid dishwash.
Fifteen years of work. Gone overnight. Because Jyothy never owned the name.
When Jyothy acquired Henkel's India business in 2011, the deal came in layers. Some brands were fully acquired. Others came through lifetime licensing. But Pril and Fa were only licensed for a fixed period, with Henkel retaining global ownership throughout. They built the equity. Someone else held the title deed.
Now ask yourself - are you doing the same thing with your personal brand?
Most founders I speak to are pouring their energy into building the company's name. The logo. The brand identity. The company LinkedIn page. The company Instagram. The company PR. And none of it is wrong. But it carries the same structural risk Jyothy just discovered.
A company brand is conditional. It depends on investors staying in. Cofounders staying aligned. Markets staying relevant. The category not getting disrupted. The licence not expiring.
Your personal brand has none of those conditions.
When M. P. Ramachandran started Jyothy Labs in 1983 with Rs. 5,000 and went door to door selling Ujala, the one thing he owned completely was his own reputation - his hustle, his story, his credibility. That founding energy is what eventually became a mid-cap FMCG company clocking nearly Rs. 3,000 crore in revenue. The founder's name travels with the founder. Always.
If tomorrow Jyothy Labs pivots, restructures, or loses another licensed brand, Ramachandran's reputation as someone who built a market leader from scratch does not go anywhere. That is not on lease. That is not subject to renewal.
Analysts estimate that the loss of Pril and Fa could cut 6-8% of Jyothy's revenues in FY27, but the impact on EBITDA could be sharper - around 14-16%. The damage is bigger than the headline number because the premium positioning that Pril carried cannot simply be transferred to another product overnight.
That is exactly what happens when you build authority under a company name alone.
The revenue sits in the company. The positioning sits in the brand. The credibility sits... where exactly?
If you step away from your company tomorrow - by choice, by circumstance, by acquisition - what travels with you? What do clients associate with you as a person, not just as the face of a logo?
Jyothy's challenge now is to prove it can build a premium franchise entirely from scratch without relying on a borrowed European brand name. That is an enormous uphill task because Exo - their owned brand - has years of budget positioning baked into consumer memory.
Repositioning a brand is hard. Repositioning yourself is far easier, and far faster - if you start before you need to.
Building your personal brand does not mean abandoning your company. It means that your reputation, your point of view, your credibility as a thinker and operator should exist independently of whatever entity you are currently running.
When a client chooses to work with you, they should be choosing you - not just the agency name on the proposal. When an opportunity knocks, it should knock on your door, not just your company's website.
Jyothy had the distribution, the cash, the relationships, the operational muscle. What they did not have was ownership of the name that carried all of it. You have something Jyothy did not. You can own your name completely. No licensing required. No renewal clause. No German conglomerate with a right to walk away.
The question is whether you are building it.
We have shared the Founder Branding Toolkit here. Many more videos like free courses are available here.