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The Indian man has a secret life. He Googles things he won't say to his doctor, buys things he won't put in a physical shopping basket, and has his most honest conversations with a chatbot at 2am. The Indian woman, on the other hand, has spent decades adjusting to a world that wasn't built with her in mind from highways to hotel rooms to the absence of a pad vending machine outside a washroom.
Three people sitting across from Storyboard18 know this better than most. Rahul Krishnan, who built Bold Care around men's sexual health, Deep Bajaj, who built Sirona for women, sold it, and bought it back, and Moses Koul, musician and actor, who has one of the more quietly observant takes on what Indian audiences actually want versus what brands think they want.
None of them played it safe.
The man nobody was selling to
Bold Care didn't start with a product. It started with a pattern. Men searching for answers to problems they couldn't say out loud and finding nothing credible on the other side. "Men don't have a community where they can be vulnerable and talk about their problems," said Rahul. "They're reaching out to chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude to figure out what's wrong with them and that's what's helping them realise that what they're going through is completely normal."
The Ranveer Singh and Johnny Sins campaign, a saas-bahu parody and a teleshopping spoof rolled into two ad films was designed to do two things at once. Build trust and remove shame. "We wanted to show that even Johnny Sins could have these problems. If he can have them, so can you. And if you do, it's not that big a deal," Rahul said. Website traffic went up sevenfold in the first week.
The re-founder
Deep Bajaj's story reads differently. He built Sirona, sold it to the Good Glamm Group, watched the brand struggle under the weight of a group trying to scale too many things at once, and bought it back. His designation now says Re-Founder. "I still had the fight in me to scale it again. That's why I'm back doing what I love every day."
But Sirona was always bigger than product. Bajaj has spent a decade trying to make the conversations nobody wants to have completely unavoidable, periods, menopause, intimate hygiene, urine incontinence. "We want to make this world better for women from puberty to menopause. The taboo breaks when men own up and play a part." Simple. And still radical in 2026.
What creators clock that brands miss
Moses Koul has watched this from both sides — as someone brands approach with briefs and as someone with an audience that responds, or doesn't. His read on where marketing loses the plot was straightforward. "Brands are slowly waking up to the fact that you cannot dictate your mandates with a ruler. When something feels authentic, people lean in. When it doesn't, they're gone."
On Instagram: "There are very few stories people actually relate to on there. It builds insecurity way too much." And on the quiet unravelling of celebrity culture: "We are sitting at the cusp of it. People know when a message is PR and when it's authentic."
No brand safety padding. Just an observation that most marketing people know is true and very few will say publicly.
What needs to change
The conversation kept coming back to the same thing. The real barrier isn't awareness or budgets or briefs. It's the baseline tolerance for silence. The mentality that keeps period supplies inside washrooms. That keeps men from admitting they need help. That treats menopause like a footnote.
Deep said it plainly: "If you can discuss your headaches, she should be able to discuss her periods."
That's not a campaign line. That's the whole brief. Period.
Also Read: She turned 70 and started a brand. Meet Janaki Paati
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