You took an almost academic approach to identifying the opportunity. What did your early research with Indian women reveal that was most telling for you?

MONA: We built our research the way we'd approach any serious policy question, by going and asking rather than assuming. Speaking with a hundred Indian women across ages and cities, what surprised us wasn't that body concerns existed, we expected that. It was how specific and how similar those concerns were once women felt safe enough to name them. Ingrown hairs after waxing, dull knees and elbows, scalp issues that had nothing to do with hair products. The demand for a body care specialist was already there. Nobody had built the vocabulary or the products to meet it.

Body care is already an established retail category, but you describe Hibiscus Monkey as a 'body-specialist brand'. What is the distinction?

NAINA: A body care brand sells you moisturiser. A body care specialist asks what your body is actually dealing with and formulates for that specific concern, the way face care has for decades. Strawberry skin, ingrown hairs, an inflamed scalp, excessive dryness…they need targeted actives at the right concentration and delivery format. Five years ago, when we first identified this as white space, legacy body care in India was built almost entirely on filler ingredients and synthetic perfume, a category designed around how a product smelled and felt for thirty seconds in the shower, not what it actually did for your skin. All the formulation rigor, all the innovation budget, went to the face. Even the newest, most disruptive entrants to the beauty space were still only building for the face. We set out to make body care as considered as anything you'd put on your face.

Was there one recurring concern or consumer conversation that convinced you this could become a distinct category rather than another skincare extension?

NAINA: There wasn't necessarily one dramatic moment, it was a pattern that kept showing up in casual conversation, at family gatherings, on the phone with friends. But if I had to point to one moment that made it undeniable, it was a young woman in our primary research telling us, quite matter of factly, that she had stopped wearing sleeveless clothes because of the ingrown bumps on her underarms. She'd simply adjusted her wardrobe around it for years, because it hadn't occurred to her that a product could actually solve it rather than something she just had to live with. That was the moment it stopped feeling like a product gap and started feeling like something bigger, women quietly altering how they dressed, how they moved through the world, around problems we knew we could solve.

Your backgrounds span finance, business, public policy and anthropology. How do those different disciplines shape the way you build the brand?

ROSHNI: Between the three of us we've sat across boardrooms and policy tables, have had careers across finance, marketing and governance, and been educated at Harvard, MIT and Cornell. By design, none of these experiences stay neatly in their lanes when you're building a brand from scratch. Finance keeps us honest about what bootstrapped actually means. Engineering and design push us toward formulation choices with a real reason behind them, not a trend. Public policy shapes how we think about behavioral change at scale and even designing our value chains. Anthropology keeps us focused on how people actually live with their bodies day to day, not how they describe themselves in a focus group. We don't divide these into departments, all three of us touch all of it, so the brand ends up shaped by multiple disciplines at once rather than any one of them dominating.

MONA: What's true is that our years apart gave each of us a different instinct, and those instincts have come together far more beautifully than any one of us could have built alone. Between us we've brought operational rigor, formulation and design discipline, and a real sharpness around brand and storytelling, and none of it sits in a fixed lane, we all reach into all of it. What I didn't expect was what this would mean for me personally. I'd stepped back from full time work for a number of years, and it was my daughters who pulled me back into it, into building something with them rather than for someone else. That's been one of the most unexpectedly special parts of this entire journey.

How do you divide ownership and make decisions when you disagree?

ROSHNI: All three of us run every function of the business rather than owning a department each, so decisions get made in the same room rather than escalated up a chain. The real advantage, though, is that we're family. We don't walk on eggshells with each other the way you might with a co-founder you've known for two years. When we disagree, we disagree fully, no hedging, no politeness for its own sake, and we work through it until we land on the right decision. That's been genuinely powerful, and I think it's an asset most founding teams don't have.

Has building Hibiscus Monkey changed your relationship as a mother and daughters, or as twin sisters?

MONA: It has, and honestly the biggest surprise for me was how much I love the creative side of this work, that wasn't something I expected of myself after years in banking. Building something with your daughters changes the texture of your relationship, you start seeing them as colleagues who happen to also be your children, and that's a strange and wonderful adjustment. There's a weight to it too, disagreements at work don't stay at work when you go home for dinner. But watching Roshni and Naina build something this considered, together, has been one of the more moving parts of my life.

The brand combines Indian rituals and ingredients with contemporary cosmetic science. How do you preserve cultural meaning without relying on nostalgia alone?

ROSHNI: Nostalgia is easy and it wears off fast. What lasts is grounding a ritual in something specific and real rather than decorative. Our grandmother's hibiscus oiling ritual isn't a story we just tell on packaging, it's the actual reason our hair oil is made with fresh hibiscus flowers…every single batch, which is operationally really challenging, but we've continued doing it anyway because that fidelity is the entire point. You see the same instinct in our Cardamom Zen probiotic body wash, where we married real skin microbiome science, a prebiotic and postbiotic complex, with cardamom, an ingredient that's instantly recognisable and deeply woven into Indian daily life, and one that also happens to carry antioxidant properties. Cultural meaning survives when it shows up in the formulation itself, not just in the copy.

What does 'face-grade body care' mean in actual formulation terms and not just as a marketing phrase?

NAINA: It means we don't accept a lower bar for the body just because the skin is less visible. Actives like squalane and plant based salicylic acid, delivery formats designed for how people actually use the product, in the shower, on wet skin, concentrations chosen for the specific concern rather than a generic all purpose formula. Our Probiotics Body Wash is probably the clearest example, it's built around a proprietary prebiotic and postbiotic complex and plant based coconut surfactants rather than the usual filler base. It is pH balanced, skin microbiome friendly and dermatologist tested for sensitive skin; it is well ahead of traditional body washes in the market in terms of the actual science behind it. Face care has had decades of that rigor. We're applying the same standard, adjusted for what the body's skin barrier actually needs, rather than diluting a face formula and hoping it works.

Are you primarily responding to existing demand, or trying to create entirely new beauty behaviours and rituals?

NAINA: Both, and I don't think you can fully separate the two. The underlying need, discomfort with untreated body concerns, was real and existing before we arrived, women just didn't always have the language for it. Five years ago, most women had no vocabulary for what we'd call dotted skin, the small rough bumps on the backs of arms or thighs. Most assumed that was simply how their skin looked, not something with a name or a solution. It took real education to explain that those are clogged hair follicles and that it's manageable. So yes, we're responding to a real problem, but we're also actively building the ritual and the vocabulary around it, spraying a mist onto wet skin, choosing a body wash for your skin microbiome, that didn't really exist before.

As India's body-care market becomes more crowded, what parts of Hibiscus Monkey might be imitated, and what do you believe will be hardest to replicate?

ROSHNI: Honestly, we're already seeing it, left and right. Brands are entirely borrowing the language we built the category on. But we're body care purists, we've never treated body care as an extension of a face care line, and that difference runs all the way through how we're engineered as a brand. Not one of our formulations is filler. Most body washes on the market are majority water, added purely to bulk up volume cheaply, and that's still true even for a lot of the newer, more fashionable brands entering this space. Our Probiotics Body Wash replaced that added water with Himalayan apricot oil and aloe vera instead, which is a genuinely different formulation, it actually moisturises the skin rather than leaving it stripped and tight.

On top of that, the body wash replaces SLS/SLES with gentle coconut surfactants, while also containing a proprietary Biotics System^TM complex that balances the skin microbiome.  Same with our body moisturizers; the Velvet Spray is entirely filler-less and water-less. These choice makes our formulation cost significantly higher than the category norm, and we're absorbing these costs, because we're not interested in competing on shelf price. We're building a category properly. Body care is our true north star, and we're not diluting it to make the margins easier.

Your visual identity and storytelling are unusually distinctive. How do you ensure that the narrative supports, rather than overshadows, product efficacy?

ROSHNI: Our Tin Edit of the HM Love Scalp Oil is probably the clearest example of what we mean by personal storytelling. The tin isn't a design decision we made in isolation, it's inspired directly by the vessel our grandmother kept her oil in, so the format itself carries the memory before you've even opened it. What's entirely ours is what's painted on it, hand illustrated, layered, loud in a way you don't usually see in skincare, and true to how we actually see ourselves rather than borrowed from anyone else's aesthetic. That combination, a real inherited object paired with artwork that's unmistakably ours, is what personal storytelling looks like when it's done properly, not decoration bolted onto a product afterward.

That same instinct runs through everything we make, not just the Tin Edit. Every piece of artwork across our portfolio is hand illustrated, our own, never generic stock botanicals or borrowed motifs. You see it in how we've approached packaging moments too: a Diwali shipping box built as a playable Ludo board, a Kansa massager gift set, a gift box built around desi makkhan that included  Cuddles (our elbow and knee body balm). None of that is separate from the product experience, it's the same belief expressed differently each time. We don't think serious body care needs to look clinical to be taken seriously, and we're actively pushing back on that assumption. Body care is deeply personal, and we think it's allowed to feel joyful and expressive even while it's seriously solving a skin concern underneath. The two aren't in tension for us, they're the same idea from two direction.

What precise consumer problem is the new launch designed to solve, and what insight originally created the product brief?

MONA: Body mists as a category have mostly been built the same way for years, alcohol and perfume based, a lightweight spray engineered to evaporate quickly and just leave a scent behind, nothing to do with your skin at all. We wanted to challenge that starting point entirely. Ours is not a perfume, ours is skincare. Ours is pH balanced, built around plant glycerine and macadamia nut oil that actually nourish the skin rather than just sitting on top of it and disappearing. Next it contains no synthetic fragrances, but rather its refreshing citrus aroma comes from botanical and plant ingredients that are rich in antioxidants – this aroma does not react with the skin and linger on. That meant we could design it to be used as a refreshing spritz multiple times a day without drying out or irritating the skin, which a conventional alcohol perfume-based mist simply can't do. The brief came directly from that gap, something people could reach for constantly, the way they would a perfume, without it working against their skin.

What was the most difficult formulation challenge to solve, and how did the finished product evolve from its earliest prototype?

NAINA: Naturally derived ingredients cost considerably more than their lab made equivalents, but we choose them anyway to avoid the irritants that come with a lot of synthetic alternatives, plant based salicylic acid used in our Ingrown Hair Treatment instead of the lab synthetic versions being one example. With the Probiotics Body Wash specifically, we set out to remove nearly everything the category takes for granted. We replaced the added water that most body washes use purely to bulk up volume with 100% natural cold pressed himalayan apricot oil and aloe vera instead. We replaced SLS with plant based coconut surfactants. And we built in a proprietary prebiotic and postbiotic complex called Biotics System^TM that actually supports the skin microbiome rather than just claiming to. That combination made it one of the most technically difficult products we've ever built, and a considerably more expensive one to manufacture. The mist had its own version of this problem, getting it to feel pleasant without alcohol or synthetic fragrance took real iteration too, but the body wash is where we really had to reinvent the formula from the ground up.

SHOP HIBISCUS MONKEY