Весь мир покупает его продукт. Но кто такой Евгений Дёмин?

Business Summary

Evgeny Demin describes SPLAT as a company built around creating consumer brands, not simply manufacturing toothpaste. The business has operated for about 25 years and sells in more than 60 countries. Its growth story combines product differentiation, international expansion, disciplined management, and a willingness to keep investing after setbacks.

Strategy and Product Development

• Start with a routine, high-frequency category. When launching SPLAT in 2001, the founders chose oral care because it is part of everyday consumption. They then aimed to make the routine more appealing through product experience, flavor, design, and quality.
• Build around customer value. Demin’s operating loop is to identify the customer’s problem, define the value delivered, communicate it effectively, monetize it fairly, and keep checking whether the value is real.
• Develop products close to customers. SPLAT’s Moscow office has an internal lab where teams create samples, test them with people, and transfer successful pilots to factories for industrial production.
• Use intrapreneurship to create new brands. A small internal team created personal-care brand Salzao and is responsible for its brand, product, and story. The wider company supports it with distribution and other shared capabilities.
• Adapt the proposition by market. In China, the company found that consumers prioritize beauty and appearance more than scientific proof. Its approach is to preserve the brand identity while changing which benefits lead the product communication.
• Expand internationally to diversify risk. Demin argues that relying on one product category and one economy makes a company vulnerable to local downturns. SPLAT’s stated areas of focus include Southeast Asia, China, Singapore, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa.

Operating and Management Playbooks

• Keep founders focused on distinctive work. Demin says SPLAT sees itself primarily as a brand-building company, even though it owns two large Russian production facilities employing about 1,000 people. He recommends delegating linear production operations to strong operators so founders can focus on brand, product, distribution, and customer trust.
• Run meetings to the decision required. Meetings can be 3, 7, 15, or 30 minutes rather than automatically an hour. Teams are expected to arrive prepared, sometimes with a one-slide brief containing the task, three options, and a recommendation.
• Clarify how leaders work. Demin wrote a short guide for his team describing what energizes him, how to communicate with him, and how he prefers to work.
• Use a regular communication rhythm. SPLAT has weekly leadership briefings, a Monday letter from Demin featuring customer correspondence and a weekly theme, a Friday HR digest, monthly company-wide meetings, informal breakfasts every two months, and board meetings every three months.
• Make customer feedback visible. Demin says he personally answers roughly 50–100 customer emails a month and shares customer letters with the team. He sees direct access as both a way to hear customers and a mechanism for exposing quality problems quickly.
• Delegate with checkpoints, not micromanagement. Delegation means accepting that people may do work differently—and sometimes better. Leaders should create a “traffic-light” review point and use open questions to help teams assess their work instead of simply judging it.
• Lead through accountability and openness. Demin credits the team for successes and treats failures as primarily his responsibility, often tracing them to poor process design, hiring, management, or insufficient support.
• Be demanding about outcomes while supportive of people. His formulation is “tough on the goal, soft on people”: sustain a clear objective while creating enough psychological safety for people to contribute and accept feedback.
• Build team alignment through example, information-sharing, feedback, and development. Demin also recommends training teams and improving productivity through automation rather than simply adding headcount.
• Separate roles in family and partner businesses. Agree on a shared long-term vision, define responsibilities and KPIs by role rather than personal relationship, set boundaries between work and home, and use a “stop word” when discussions cross those boundaries.

Metrics and Targets Mentioned

• International reach: Products are sold in 60+ countries.
• Early product setback: After the founders shifted from distribution to their own brand, sales fell by 99%. Within the following year, revenue grew by 400%.
• Russian market position: SPLAT said it became number one in market share in Russia at the end of the previous year, despite competitors remaining in the market and offering steep discounts. No exact share was given.
• Salzao: Reported revenue of 850 million rubles last year, with 2.1 billion rubles planned. The transcript does not clearly specify the target year.
• Management span: Demin has around 25 direct reports and argues that modern tools, automation, short meetings, training, and mutual respect can make this workable.
• Productivity: The company’s annual goal is 10%+ growth in revenue per employee and profit per employee.
• Headcount and growth: The stated ambition is to keep company size roughly constant while doubling revenue over the next three years.
• Longer-term growth: SPLAT wants to double revenue within three to four years, launch two more brands, and may enter healthy food. Demin described a long-term ambition to grow its health-and-beauty offering for 200–300 million people.
• Manufacturing investment: SPLAT bought a Russian plant for approximately 500 million rubles. The expected payback horizon was around five years; after three years, the investment had not yet been recovered.
• Supply-chain exposure during COVID: About 90% of supplies were imported. At one point, the company had roughly 30 days of production remaining while its monthly payroll was about 400 million rubles.
• Losses and write-offs: Demin cited portfolio projects with cumulative losses exceeding 1 billion rubles and said the Chinese office had been operating for ten years without profit, with more than 1 billion rubles of investment written off.
• Leadership feedback: A 360-degree review drew 110 respondents and produced 52 pages of comments.

Examples and Lessons

• The risky brand pivot: SPLAT’s first four products ranked last in domestic sales. The founders nevertheless gave up their steadier distribution business and backed their own brand. The initial 99% sales drop was followed by 400% revenue growth within a year.
• Product innovation through internal entrepreneurship: The Salzao team developed products and brand positioning internally, demonstrating how a small, accountable team can build a new business within a larger company.
• Crisis response: During COVID-related supply disruption, the company faced a short production runway. The team regrouped and began producing antiseptics and other products about a week later.
• Investment discipline: Demin acknowledges that strong belief in a project can become overconfidence and lead to underestimating risk. He says the company set a decision deadline for some loss-making projects rather than investing indefinitely.
• Manufacturing acquisition: SPLAT bought a plant it already knew through contract manufacturing, having assessed its production culture, team, and ability to take on more orders. Demin’s broader lesson is to acquire operations based on a clear plan for utilization and capacity—not to let production pull leadership away from the company’s core strategy.
• Customer-led quality control: Direct customer email can surface problems faster than formal service channels, provided the company acts on the feedback and maintains a low tolerance for defects.

Recommendations for Founders

• Focus on a clearly defined customer problem and an observable value proposition; avoid vague “average” products for an overly broad audience.
• Test products early with real users, then scale only after the pilot works.
• Look beyond the home market and expand across countries or regions to reduce concentration risk.
• Revisit established processes: ask why a product launch takes 12 months, whether it can take six, and how campaigns could be faster, cheaper, or more effective.
• Protect strategic focus, and judge leadership calendars by how much time goes to work only the CEO can do versus tasks that can be delegated.
• Build a shared team picture of the goal, maintain transparency in uncertain periods, and make feedback part of normal work.
• Plan for efficiency growth rather than treating headcount growth as the main sign of success.
• Use personal setbacks and leadership feedback as information for improvement, while putting colleagues or systems in place to flag blind spots.
• Demin’s motivational advice is to set an ambitious scale goal—potentially 10× or 50× growth—then reassess the business model and operating efficiency needed to pursue it.

Presenters and Sources

• Evgeny Demin — SPLAT co-founder and CEO; interview subject.
• Host/interviewer — From the Основатели (“Founders”) channel; not identified by name in the subtitles.
• Other people mentioned: Elena Demina, Demin’s wife and a partner responsible for development, marketing, and product strategy; the Salzao team; and Alexander Smirnov, introduced as a separate entrepreneur during a brief segment.