Ghazal Alagh has said the first product the couple wanted for their baby was easy to name and surprisingly hard to find. They wanted chemical-free care, and, in her words, they could not find options that were easily available in India. So they imported what they could, or asked friends travelling abroad to carry it back. It was slow. It was expensive. It nagged at them.
Ghazal had come to this moment by an odd route. She studied for a BCA in information technology, then worked as a corporate trainer at NIIT. She took a course in figurative art at the New York Academy of Art and was recognised as an emerging woman artist of India. Before Mamaearth she ran dietexpert.in, a health startup that built customised diet plans.In 2016 they launched Mamaearth from Gurugram with baby products. Trust was the first problem. A new brand claiming to be toxin-free asks a mother to believe a stranger. So the Alaghs sought certification from a non-profit, MadeSafe, rather than asking people to take their word. Money was tight, which meant little advertising and a lot of word of mouth.
She studied for a BCA in information technology, then worked as a corporate trainer at NIIT.
The turn came from their own customers. Millennials, Ghazal has said, wanted the same safe products for themselves, so the company diversified into adult personal care. A baby brand became a house of brands. Fireside Ventures and Stellaris backed them early, followed by Sequoia, Sofina and Evolvence, and the company was declared a unicorn.
Growth was not smooth. Honasa, the listed parent, was still posting losses a year earlier, including ₹18.56 crore in the September 2024 quarter. Then, in the quarter to September 2025, it reported a profit of ₹39 crore on like-for-like revenue of ₹566 crore, up 22.5 percent. Varun's headline line was that Mamaearth was back in the green. The Derma Co. now runs above ₹750 crore a year, and a prestige skincare brand called Luminéve launched exclusively on Nykaa.
What stays useful for a first-time founder is how unglamorous the origin was. There was no market-sizing slide. There was a baby, an import bill and a friend with spare luggage space. The business started as a household problem that two people were willing to solve for themselves, and it only became a company when strangers turned out to have the same one.