Growing up, I dealt with terrible acne. I remember using ointments that looked and smelled so sad that, at times, they made me feel like something was wrong with me. I didn’t have the language then to explain why that bothered me so much. I just knew I wanted my skin to look different.
I never imagined that those experiences would eventually become the reason I built a company.
Skincare has always been personal for me.
I grew up in Sangamner in a family where entrepreneurship was part of everyday life. I had watched my family build businesses, make difficult decisions and live with the uncertainty that comes with creating something of your own. So entrepreneurship was never an unfamiliar world to me.
But I didn’t know what I wanted to build.
That changed during my undergraduate years.
A group of friends and I went on a trip together. We came from different ethnic backgrounds and had very different skin types. We all happened to use the same sunscreen at the beach, and I remember noticing how differently it affected each of our skin.
That small observation stayed with me.
Why was it that we were expected to use the same skincare products when our skin clearly didn’t respond to them in the same way?
I started reading. Then researching. Then asking more questions.
What began as curiosity turned into two years of research, consumer surveys, working and re-working formulations with dermatologists, and clinical trials. The more I learned, the more convinced I became that skincare made specifically for young, brown skin was still far too rare.
That was when Skinvest started becoming more than an idea.
Building something I couldn’t find
I didn’t want to create another skincare brand simply because the category was growing. I wanted to solve problems that I had experienced myself, and that I knew other young Indians were experiencing too.
A lot of skincare conversations seemed to assume that one solution could work for everyone. But skin doesn’t work that way. Climate, skin type, pigmentation, lifestyle and a hundred other things can change how a product behaves.
That became the foundation of Skinvest: understand the problem first, then build the solution.
In February 2022, Skinvest came to life with a small team of people who were, in many ways, skincare nerds. We cared about ingredients and formulations, but we also cared about making effective skincare feel less intimidating and more accessible.
Of course, having conviction doesn’t make building a company easy.
The messy part of entrepreneurship
There is a version of entrepreneurship that looks very neat from the outside. You have an idea, you work hard, people believe in it, and eventually things start working.
My experience has been much less linear.
There have been delayed launches, formulations that needed more work, decisions I got wrong and moments when I wondered whether I was doing enough. Sometimes the hardest part wasn’t solving the problem in front of me. It was learning to sit with uncertainty without letting it make every decision for me.
I’ve also learned that not every mistake needs to become a crisis.
There was a point when I stopped trying to compete with every big brand around me and started asking a much smaller, harder question:
Are we better than we were yesterday?
That shift changed a lot for me.
I became less interested in chasing noise and more interested in building our own bar. Every miscalculation became information. I’ve stopped being afraid of getting things wrong. I’m more afraid of not paying attention to what going wrong is trying to tell me.
And I think that’s one of the biggest lessons entrepreneurship has given me: progress isn’t always visible from the outside. Sometimes it is simply becoming better at making the next decision.
Remembering why I started
It is very easy to let a business become your entire identity.
There are always numbers to look at, decisions to make and something that needs fixing. When you’re constantly thinking about the next launch or the next milestone, you can forget that there is a life happening alongside the business.
My family has helped me remember that.
My husband, Raghav, my brother Jai and my sister-in-law Shreya have been my grounding force. They understand the highs and the exhaustion that come with building something, and I don’t always have to explain either.
My wedding was one of those moments that brought everything back into perspective.
For a while, I had been so consumed by work that it was easy to measure life in launches, targets and growth. Then I was surrounded by the people I love, celebrating something that had nothing to do with business.
It reminded me why building something meaningful matters in the first place.
What I want Skinvest to stand for
Today, my vision goes beyond building a successful skincare company.
I want Indian skin to stop being treated as an exception in global skincare conversations. I want it to be understood, studied and formulated for with the same seriousness as anywhere else in the world.
I also want people to feel less held back by their skin.
I’ve been that person who looked at her skin and felt like something was wrong with her. If what we’re building can help someone move from that feeling to simply feeling comfortable in their own skin, then that matters to me.
I don’t know exactly what the next few years will look like.
But I know why I started.
I started with questions about my own skin.
I kept going because I realised I wasn’t the only one asking them. And I’m building because I believe those questions deserve better answers.
