After ALL MAN’s Mintel Most Innovative 2026 recognition, Founder, ALL MAN, Himanshu Pathak speaks to Priyanka Parshurami in an Exclusive Tete-te-Tete about the consumer problem that started ALL MAN. Why temporary grey coverage made more sense than another permanent hair colour. And the realities of building an innovative product and why he believes Indian Men’s Grooming has far more problems waiting to be solved.
What if men’s grooming did not need another version of an existing product, but a solution to a problem men have simply learned to live with?
That question sits at the heart of ALL MAN, the men’s grooming brand founded by Himanshu Pathak and launched in January 2025. Less than two years into the journey, the Gurgaon-based brand has moved from a two-member team to a business that scaled from zero to ₹1.25 crore in GMV in its first year and is now targeting more than ₹4 crore.
Its approach has also received global recognition. ALL MAN’s 24-Hours Instant Grey Cover has been recognised among Mintel Most Innovative 2026 products in Beauty & Personal Care.
“It Is About the Problem, Not Just the Product”
For Pathak, the Mintel recognition is significant because it validates the thinking behind ALL MAN.
“When we started ALL MAN, we wanted to create products around how men actually live today,” he explains. “Instant Grey Cover grew out of that thinking.”
That distinction matters.
Rather than looking at a category and asking what product could be added to it, Pathak says ALL MAN starts by identifying a grooming frustration and questioning whether there is a better way to address it.
Mintel’s recognition, therefore, gives the founder confidence that this consumer-led approach has relevance beyond one product or even one market.
Why Grey Hair Became the Starting Point
The idea for Instant Grey Cover came from a simple observation: men do not necessarily want to eliminate their grey hair permanently.
Sometimes they simply want to cover it for a particular occasion.
A meeting. An interview. A date. A wedding. A photograph.
Pathak himself experienced this distinction.
“There are days when I genuinely don’t care about my greys,” he says. “But covering them before a meeting, an interview, a date, a wedding or even a photograph just made sense to me.”
That led to a different question: what if grey coverage could be temporary?
Permanent hair colour can feel disproportionate when the concern is only a few visible greys. There is the application process, the commitment to the colour and the maintenance as new hair grows.
ALL MAN saw an opportunity between two extremes: doing nothing and permanently colouring the hair.
The answer was a product that could be applied when needed, provide immediate coverage, stay through the day and wash out.
“It’s Not Really About Hiding Ageing”
Perhaps the most interesting part of the product, according to Pathak, is not the grey coverage itself.
It is the control it gives the consumer.
He believes many men are not trying to deny ageing. They simply want the freedom to decide how they look on a particular day.
That makes Instant Grey Cover less about changing one’s appearance permanently and more about having an additional grooming choice.
Pathak draws an interesting parallel with makeup.
“For me, that’s the most interesting part of the product,” he says. “It’s not really about hiding ageing. It’s about giving more control over how we want to look on any particular day, just like what makeup is meant for women.”
It is a subtle shift in how men’s grooming can be understood: not as correction, but as choice.
The Hard Part Was Making It Work
The idea may sound simple now. Developing it was not.
It took approximately three to four months to formulate Instant Grey Cover, with one central challenge: making the product smudge-proof and transfer-proof while retaining the temporary nature of the coverage.
Pathak describes repeated trials on his own beard during development.
Sweat, humidity, water, touching the face and even wearing a mask could affect the performance of a temporary colour product.
The team also wanted to formulate the product without relying on ingredients commonly associated with permanent hair colouring, including PPD, ammonia, resorcinol and hydrogen peroxide.
The development process therefore involved repeated testing around texture, application, coverage, wear and wash-off.
“There was a lot of testing and iteration,” says Pathak. “The final product is the result of getting many small things right rather than one big breakthrough.”
That perhaps offers a useful insight into what innovation actually looks like inside a young consumer brand.
It is rarely one dramatic moment.
More often, it is a series of small decisions that eventually make a product work.
From Two People to a Bigger Ambition
ALL MAN began with Pathak and one intern.
The brand now operates across its own website, Amazon, Flipkart and Blinkit, while gradually expanding its offline presence and using social platforms to create consumer pull.
The scale-up has happened quickly, but Pathak’s ambition extends beyond distribution.
He sees considerable room for innovation in men’s grooming because many everyday frustrations remain largely unaddressed.
“Men have simply accepted many everyday grooming frustrations as normal because nobody has really tried to solve them differently,” he says.
That becomes the basis for how he sees the next phase of ALL MAN.
Not chasing every growing category.
Not launching products because a market is trending.
Instead, finding problems that are worth solving and building products around them.
What Comes Next for ALL MAN?
The Mintel recognition has strengthened that conviction.
For Pathak, it has reduced some of the uncertainty that naturally comes with building an unconventional product pipeline.
The next phase is therefore about expanding the portfolio while staying true to the original premise: useful innovation rooted in real consumer behaviour.
And there is a larger ambition behind it.
Pathak wants ALL MAN to become a brand that can travel beyond India.
The objective is not simply to build an Indian men’s grooming company for Indian consumers, but to create solutions that can have relevance across markets.
That changes the scale of the question the brand is asking.
Instead of asking, “What should ALL MAN launch next?”
The more interesting question is: What grooming problem have men everywhere accepted as normal that could actually be solved differently?
For a brand that started with a simple observation about a few grey hairs, that is a considerably bigger proposition.
And perhaps that is the real significance of the Mintel recognition for ALL MAN. It has not just validated a product. It has strengthened the founder’s belief that consumer problems can become categories when someone is willing to look at them differently.
