MAM
Roposo unveils new men’s grooming brand with actor Rana Daggubati
Mumbai: Creator-led live entertainment commerce platform Roposo and actor Rana Daggubati on Thursday announced the launch of their co-created men’s grooming brand DCRAF.
DCRAF is derived from ‘D’ for Daggubati, and ‘Craf’ – a colloquial short form of the English expression ‘Hair Craft’ – popularly associated with men’s grooming in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. It will cater to millennial and gen-Z men in tier-1 and 2 markets. The brand has grooming products for face, beard, and skincare categories.
“DCRAF was created with the belief that grooming and taking care of oneself should not be tedious. By overly complicating grooming rituals, most brands tend to alienate consumers and deter men from experiencing the joy that comes with looking and feeling good. DCRAF aims to simplify grooming through the tagline ‘It’s that simple’ and well-designed products,” Roposo said in a statement.
DCRAF uses fun, creative adaptations of Indian faces from across the country and various regional scripts in its branding as a celebration of India’s diversity. The brand also plans to launch a reality show, live and exclusive on Roposo and Glance, to find a user who will be the next face of DCRAF. The winner will feature on DCRAF packaging and will join Daggubati in representing the brand.
The men’s grooming market has been growing rapidly in India and is one of the major focus areas for live commerce on Glance and Roposo. According to market estimates, the industry is expected to reach $1.2 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 11 per cent. Fashion and beauty, which includes men’s grooming, is the top-performing category on Roposo. 50 per cent of its total live commerce creators belong to it. The platform expects the launch of DCRAF to further accelerate growth in this segment.
This launch is the latest in the line of celebrity-led original labels to be launched by Roposo through Glance Collective – a joint venture between Roposo’s parent company Glance and talent management firm Collective Artists Network. In November 2021, they had jointly launched their first co-created brand ‘EK’ with Ekta Kapoor, in the home and wellness category. Roposo is looking at co-creating around 100 such celebrity and creator-led brands across multiple segments, with an aim of fueling the creator economy through multiple entrepreneurial opportunities.
“Our intention has been to partner with celebrities and creators to launch brands that reflect their unique persona and become an extension of who they are,” stated Roposo GM and VP Mansi Jain. “Rana is one of the most fashionable contemporary male celebrities and is followed by many for his sense of style and grooming. We are delighted to be partnering with him to launch DCRAF. With the live commerce technology and the scale of our platforms, we expect DCRAF to be discovered by millions of users across India.”
Brands
IICT partners with Gativedhi to bring studio production tools to students
New MoU lets students explore AI-driven production pipelines for AVGC-XR
MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) has teamed up with Gativedhi Technologies to give students a front-row seat to modern studio production. The collaboration will integrate Gativedhi’s AI-powered production intelligence platform, Shotrack, into academic programmes, letting students experience the workflow systems used by animation, VFX and gaming studios.
Under the MoU, faculty, students and researchers will get hands-on access to Shotrack through beta programmes, pilot deployments and academic evaluations. This will allow them to explore simulated production pipelines, understand asset management, track tasks and monitor schedules, essentially seeing how complex projects come together behind the scenes.
Shotrack is designed to tackle a key industry challenge: when multiple studios work on the same project, differing internal systems often create bottlenecks, slow approvals and complicate version control. The platform provides a unified production environment, enabling smoother collaboration across distributed teams while generating operational insights and predictive analytics to optimise crew allocation, forecast schedule risks and manage costs.
The collaboration also opens doors to Gativedhi’s wider ecosystem. Upcoming tools include StudioTrack, for studio operations management covering budgeting, recruitment and IT infrastructure, and WorkTrack, which measures workflow efficiency and team productivity across industries.
IICT plans to embed these tools into programmes covering animation pipelines, VFX workflows, gaming production and media project management. Students will also benefit from guest lectures, masterclasses, workshops, internships and research projects that connect academic learning with real-world studio practices.
IICT CEO Vishwas Deoskar, said the partnership provides “An environment where production pipeline tools can be explored, tested and refined while students gain insight into how large-scale productions are organised.”
Gativedhi Technologies founder & CEO Senthil Kumar added, “This collaboration introduces students to real-world studio management tools and helps us improve our platform with academic feedback.”
With Shotrack in classrooms, India’s future animators, VFX artists and gaming producers will get a taste of studio life long before they step into one.
