The iconic 89-year-old South African brand changing in front of everyone’s eyes

Tiger Brands is overhauling and repositioning the iconic skincare brand Ingram’s, with the company looking to broaden the brand’s appeal outside of medicinal skincare products. 

This is being driven by a need to diversify its revenue streams, boost profitability, and increasingly compete against international brands. 

Global brands such as L’Oreal, through CeraVe, Beiersdorf, through Eucerin, and others have been growing strongly in the segment of the market dominated by Ingram’s. 

While Ingram’s remains the dominant player in the camphor cream market to treat dry skin, it has failed to tap into other segments. 

The changes to the brand under Tiger Brands CEO Tjaart Kruger to tap into new market segments are some of the most significant since Ingram’s establishment in 1937. 

Ingram’s was first founded as a pharmacy on the corner of a street in Hillbrow by Fred Ingram to supply medicine to a growing Johannesburg. 

Skincare was not part of the fold until a famous pharmacist, Len Tannenbaum, found a young German immigrant chemist searching for work in the city. 

Tannenbaum challenged this chemist, Hans Rose, to find a treatment for dry, chapped hands in exchange for a job at Ingram’s Pharmacy. 

Rose returned a day later with a pot of cooling, moisturising cream formulated with camphor, according to Tiger Brands’ recollection of events. 

This cream, vital for moisturising skin during the extremely dry Highveld winters, was only sold at Ingram’s, and it quickly took on the pharmacy’s name. 

After Rose left South Africa, he gifted the recipe to the Tannenbaum family, who had taken over Ingram’s and were in the process of creating a pharmaceutical giant. 

The growing retail, wholesale and manufacturing business of Ingram’s Pharmacy would become Adcock Ingram in time. 

This entity manufactured Ingram’s camphor cream and was the first pharmaceutical company to list on the JSE in 1950. 

Tiger Brands only came knocking in the 1990s, and it snapped up Adcock Ingram as industrial giants emerged under the apartheid government’s strict rules on foreign investment. 

In the late 2000s, Tiger Brands unbundled Adcock Ingram, but kept ownership of Ingram’s cream. The two would fight a legal battle in 2011 over the cream’s branding. 

Tiger Brands ultimately kept control of the signature green-and-white brand and trade name, with the court’s ruling preventing Adcock Ingram from launching a look-alike competitor. 

Overhauling an 89-year-old brand 

Tiger Brands is undergoing significant changes as part of Kruger’s turnaround of the company after severe strategic missteps over the past decade. 

Kruger has sought to simplify and streamline the business, leveraging its scale to drive efficiency by disposing of several non-core businesses. 

The CEO has also changed Tiger Brands’ management structure and renewed its focus on its so-called “power brands”, which refer to its dominant brands in key market segments. 

Ingram’s has been elevated to one of these brands, with it occupying a strong position in the skincare market. 

While it is not within Tiger Brands’ traditional area of dominance in food production, its personal care segment is immensely profitable due to its higher margins. 

The company has also invested heavily in this segment, with it including brands such as Peaceful Sleep and Doom alongside Ingram’s. 

However, while Ingram’s is a strong player in the skincare market, it has been relatively limited to treating dry skin and has not been seen as having broad use cases.

Kruger aims to change this by repositioning it as a broader brand, with the ultimate goal to shift consumer perception of Ingram’s to “represent moisture”.

In practical terms, this means expanding Ingram’s into adjacent product categories through new, related products to grow volume. 

To grow into these adjacent segments, Tiger Brands wants to leverage Ingram’s market-leading name to get customers to buy its general-use body lotions. 

So far, the company said these new products have been well-received by consumers, with the repositioning of Ingram’s only occurring in the past six months. 

In effect, Tiger Brands wants Ingram’s to compete directly with the likes of Nivea, Vaseline, and other mass-market skincare brands. 

Simultaneously, it is looking to maintain Ingram’s position as a dominant medicinal skincare brand that was originally distributed through hospitals. 

This may prove a tricky balancing act, but it is likely to generate significant profits for the group if it can pull it off, with personal care offering significantly higher margins than food production.