Every lasting solution begins with the right question

Most consumer health products start with a market gap and work backwards to a formulation. We start with a mechanism and work forwards. It is slower, and it is the only way to build something that still holds up when somebody checks.

The method

Our work moves through four stages, and a programme can fail at any of them. Several have.

1. Find the real question

The presenting problem is rarely the problem. Recurrent urinary infection is not primarily a hygiene failure. Premature skin ageing is not only a surface phenomenon. Each programme begins by reading the literature properly and asking what is actually driving the thing people are living with, and what the published evidence will and will not support.

This stage produces a hypothesis specific enough to be wrong.

2. Formulate against the mechanism

Once we have a mechanism, the formulation is designed to act on it rather than to meet a price point or a marketing brief. Ingredients earn their place by function. Those that cannot be justified mechanistically are removed, however well they would read on a label.

We build in prototypes and we retire the ones that fail. That is the point of prototypes.

3. Test it

A formulation that works in theory and has not been tested is a hypothesis, not a product. Stability, safety and consumer-use studies are run before launch, through independent testing houses rather than in-house.

Where a question is better answered by an academic or government research institution than by us, we seek that collaboration rather than approximating it ourselves.

4. Make it at scale, and keep the claims honest

A product that cannot be manufactured reproducibly at a price Indian consumers will pay has not solved anything. Our formulations are designed with manufacturing in mind from the first prototype.

And what we say about a product is limited to what the evidence supports and what its regulatory category permits. A cosmetic is described as a cosmetic. We would rather be the brand that undersells than the one that gets reclassified.

Awareness is part of the method, not a marketing layer

A formulation only reaches someone who knows there is a problem worth naming. In most of the conditions we work on, the knowledge gap is as consequential as the clinical one, and it is measurable. So we measure it, publish what we find, and run education programmes structurally separate from our commercial activity.

More on our social impact work.

What this means in practice

• We publish our reasoning, including in peer-reviewed literature, and cite sources in our public education material
• We state what is not yet established as readily as what is
• We retire approaches that do not work rather than reformulating the story around them
• We would rather say “most people do not need this” and be trusted than claim universal benefit and not be

That last one costs us sales. It is also the only reason anyone should believe the rest.