Parenting is no easy job. Along with the happiness of welcoming a new life, the new roles and responsibilities for parents can be quite taxing, especially for moms who undergo a lot of physical and emotional changes. To make things easy, Fireside Ventures, the lead investor in Honasa Consumer Pvt Ltd’s brand Mamaearth, which focusses on healthy products for mothers and babies. The brand currently offers more than 20 different products, which help solve various problems of young parents and has sold more than 50,000 units in a short span of eight months.
The brand started by couple Varun and Ghazal Alagh in 2016 recently launched products for lactation, stress relief and postpartum weight loss under Traditional Recipes. Capitalising on toxin-free products to reduce parenting stress, it has introduced Feel Better Tea, Mama’s Milk Tea, Stress Relief Tea, Organic Apple Cider Vinegar, Passion and so on for new moms.
The label’s objective is to provide trusted natural remedies in-easy-to-consume formats, and continue to innovate and drive offline expansion across metros. Currently, all Mamaearth products are available on leading shopping portals. Given that there are already hundreds of brands selling mothercare and baby products, what made the founders venture into this sector?
Answers Varun, ‘chief dad’ and co-founder, Mamaearth, “We are parents of a two-year-old ourselves and our experience has been that while there are many brands not all are certified ‘safe’. India does not have any local regulation for babycare products hence it becomes extremely important that the products are regulated and certified by an external agency. We worked with madesafe.org, an independent not-for-profit US-based organisation which certifies brands to be completely free of toxins/ harmful chemicals.”
Talking about how their product is different from others, he says, “We are Asia’s first MadeSafe certified brand and use high quality natural ingredients in our products. We currently have more than 20 such products to solve problems like mosquitoes bites, morning sickness, lactation, body pains, stress, etc. In five years, we want it to be a one-stop shop for all parenting needs. We believe this is a billion dollar opportunity in the next 10 years’ time.”
Of late, we have seen a sudden surge in brands working on natural ingredients and organic products. Commenting on the same, Varun says that this revolution towards natural products is very aggressively present in developed markets. “In India, a strong wave of the same has come in the last 4-5 years. What we need to realise is that the more we move away from nature the more problems we create for our bodies. This was understood around the food that we intake for a long term but now is being accepted also in terms of what we apply on our body. If we want to live long and lead healthy lives, ‘natural’ is the way forward,” he informs.
Varun further explains that they are extremely careful about their quality standards. “We have multiple checks that happen for each of our products. All our ingredients are made safe certified and all our products are dermatologically tested according to European labs basis (European standards) as well as Indian labs basis (BIS standards). Our products are FDA approved. Beyond this, we also take extreme precautions in our manufacturing processes to ensure high quality standards,” he says.
