A family name.
A Bombay beginning.

Two brothers, one name

Dhanthak is two names joined: Dhanrajmal and Thakurdas Ranglani, elder and younger brother. Thakurdas began making soap in Karachi in the 1930s. Laundry soap then was a local craft as much as an industry; the Bureau of Indian Standards still notes, in its laundry-soap specification, that laundry soaps are made in organised factories as well as in small non-power units and village co-operatives. The brothers’ cake was an oil soap: fats boiled with caustic soda, cured, cut and stamped by hand.

Bombay, 1948

Partition took the family across the new border. In 1948 Thakurdas set up again in Kurla, in what was then Bombay, and gave the laundry cake a new name for a new city: BB Soap, Bombay’s Best. The recipe travelled with him. So did the habit of finishing each cake by hand.

A jingle the city knew

For twenty years a Hindi radio jingle, written by the late Sheel Kumar and produced by Apex Advertising, asked the question every household asked: which soap for this heap of clothes? The answer, Dhanthak ka double B sabun, promised clothes that came out bright, shone, and lasted longer. The words are on our Media page.

The second generation

Chetan Ranglani joined his father in 1964. When Thakurdas died in 1981, Chetan became Chief Executive and Chairman, and he holds both roles today. His son Umesh works alongside him. Under them the family diversified: real estate at Paras in Santacruz and at Dhanthak Plaza in Andheri East, where our head office now sits, and information technology through Rhombus Technologies. The soap stayed the heart of the group.

Exports since 1994

In 1994 the first containers left Mumbai. Re-exporters in Dubai carried BB Soap onward to buyers across Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and the cake gained a wrapper in Arabic for the UAE. Those routes are still open; the Exports page sets out how an order works.

Pune, and what has not changed

Manufacture now runs at a semi-automatic factory at Wagholi on the Pune Nagar Road. The oils, palm, palm kernel and coconut, are still saponified with caustic soda. Silicate of soda is still the builder. The perfume is still lemon. The soap is still cured for weeks before it is cut, stamped and wrapped. An accredited laboratory measured the total fatty matter at 56.6 per cent, and we guarantee at least 50 per cent in every cake.

Customers write to tell us they have used BB Soap for thirty or forty years. Some bathe with it. One group follows a Jain muni who recommends it. We take that as the only brief that matters: keep the cake the same, and make it easier to buy.