With Aastha, Patanjali wants to be the god of home worship space

Baba Ramdev's Patanjali Ayurved is all set to enter the largely unorganised Rs 30,000-crore home worship segment with products such as agarbatti, dhoop, samagri and brass diyas among others.

Patanjali will enter the market under the brand Patanjali Aastha in the next two months. The organised part of the industry is barely Rs 8,000 crore and that too largely the agarbatti sub-category.

The brand, which has already made its presence felt in categories such as medicine and FMCG, is a late entrant in the home worship category despite being led by spiritual guru Baba Ramdev. The yoga guru is also the promoter of spiritual TV channel Aastha.

Speaking about the late entry in the category, Patanjali’s spokesperson, S K Tijarawala said, “We were focussing on getting best quality medicines and food products for consumers and hence we started with medicines. Later, we went on to manufacture and release food products and FMCG products because we wanted people to use pure stuff. Then, recently we realised that puja samagri too has a lot of adulteration, which causes respiratory disorders and cancer. Due to our spiritual connection, we thought of launching this.”

The brand was already present in the agarbatti market under the name Madhuram, which will now come under the umbrella Aastha brand.

The agarbatti market itself is estimated to be around Rs 20,000 crore of which a mere Rs 2,500 crore is organised. ITC, which entered the agarbatti market a few years ago with the brand Mangaldeep, is growing at a compounded annual rate of over 20 per cent, media reports said.

The other big players in this category are Cycle, which controls 25 per cent of the organised agarbatti market, and Mysore Deep.

The home worship products, under the brand name Patanjali Aastha, will be exclusively distributed by Pittie Group under Shubhkart, an online marketplace exclusively selling religious and spiritual products.

Elaborating on the promotion and marketing plan for this line of products, Tijarawala said, “Aastha as a brand and puja paath has a very strong connection. Also, we are the promoters of Aastha Channel and we had the liberty to use it. We have a detailed media plan for it which goes beyond Om Shanti Om and Star Bharat. We have tapped news channels, Hindi channels and the religious genre."

Om Shanti Om is a bhajan reality show that currently airs on Star Bharat (formerly Life Ok) where Baba Ramdev is a ‘Maha Judge’.

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