My Learnings from RetailEX 2026 · Post 01 of 13 — e4m RetailEX Conference 2026, Mumbai, April 15 2026.
I’ve sat through a lot of conference keynotes. Most of them tell you what you already know, dressed up in new slides. Ashish Rai’s session at e4m RetailEX 2026 was different. He didn’t talk about paint. He talked about a feeling — and then showed exactly how JSW Paints built a business around eliminating it.
That feeling is regret. The quiet disappointment that follows a high-stakes purchase when reality doesn’t match imagination. “What I saw is not what I got.”
For decades, this was the unspoken reality of buying paint in India. You’d walk into a store — often poorly lit — flip through a shade card, try to imagine how a 2cm colour swatch would look across an entire wall, and then commit ₹50,000 to ₹1,00,000 to that imagination. If it went wrong, you lived with it for the next five years.
Ashish asked a simple question: what if we eliminated that regret before the consumer spent a single rupee?
“We realised the real problem was that we were asking consumers to make a very involved choice — based on imagination — with no assurance.”
— Ashish Rai, CEO Decorative Paints, JSW Paints
A Challenger Brand in One of India’s Most Competitive Categories
JSW Paints launched in 2019. They entered a market dominated by Asian Paints — which commands roughly 50% market share — and Berger Paints, with decades of brand equity and distribution entrenched across every corner of the country. Most people in the industry told them they were too late.
Ashish joined as Chief Business Officer in 2024 and was elevated to CEO of the Decorative Paints division in July 2025. He brought with him 18 years at Unilever — where he led a €16 billion business across 23 markets as Global VP for Distributive Trade and B2B E-commerce. He is not a paint person. He’s a consumer person. And that distinction matters enormously.
- 90 lakh+ monthly digital searches for “what colour for my home”
- 86% of those searches happen on mobile
- 30% of consumers research digitally before entering the purchase cycle
These numbers tell you something important. The consumer had already moved online. They were searching, scrolling, getting inspired on Instagram. But when they walked into the store — they were still being handed a shade card and asked to imagine.
The Philosophy: Confidence Before Commitment
“Move consumers from guesswork to certainty — before they spend a single rupee. Confidence before commitment.”
— Ashish Rai
JSW Paints built a colour visualiser — first as an in-store experience using an 8×10 foot space with a large TV screen where consumers could upload photos of their actual home and see it transformed in real time. They deployed this across 320 retail points. 60,000 consumers visit every month to see their home transformed before they buy.
Then they took it further. They moved to an AI-powered visualiser on the smartphone. You take a photo of your room. You describe what you want — conversationally, the way you’d ask ChatGPT. The tool shows you your walls in morning light, evening light, direct sunlight, different settings. Entirely personalised. Entirely yours. Before you spend a rupee.
The business outcome: India’s national repainting cycle has dropped from 5 years to 3.5 years. In top metro cities, it’s now 3 years. When consumers trust what they’re buying, they buy more confidently and come back sooner.
“Especially in metro cities, people are money-rich and time-poor. They need that one hour — blocked for certainty — and then they take it forward.”
— Ashish Rai
My 3 Takeaways
1. The real product is confidence, not paint.
JSW didn’t sell colour — they sold certainty. Every category has a version of this hidden insight. What is the specific fear your consumer carries into the purchase decision? If you can identify and eliminate that fear before the transaction — you don’t just win the sale. You accelerate the entire category’s repurchase cycle.
2. Technology should reduce friction, not add features.
90 lakh people search every month for “what colour should I paint my home?” — 86% on mobile. Ashish didn’t build an app because it was fashionable. He built one tool that answered the one question blocking the purchase. The best use of technology is always the simplest.
3. Have a reverse mentor.
His closing line stayed with me longest. “Have a digital native reverse mentor in your life. Be humble. Don’t feel that all of us know all the answers. Because we don’t. Things are changing faster than we can imagine.”
What Ashish Rai demonstrated at RetailEX 2026 is something I believe sits at the heart of every brand challenge I work on at Mindstorm. The path to purchase has changed. Consumers no longer walk into a store to discover — they walk in to confirm. The brands that build certainty upstream will win the category downstream.
JSW Paints is building that certainty — one room visualisation at a time. And the repainting cycle is shrinking as a result.
That’s not a marketing win. That’s a category transformation.
Aniketh Dsouza is the Founder of Mindstorm, a strategic growth consultancy operating across 22+ countries. He works with founders and CMOs on category strategy, brand positioning, and growth architecture.
