IIT Kharagpur Topper And Former Apple Employee Founded Fresh Skincare Brand Nat Habit

Swagatika Das studied B.Tech in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering to enter the heart of the oil and gas industry, but his heart was in the consumer business. After working as an engineer for over half a decade, she decided to change careers and started at Apple as a business and operational strategy planner in Singapore.

“I have always been fascinated by the mind of the consumer and joining Apple was my first further step. After that, I always wanted to start in the consumer space, and Apple was my first step, says Swagatika, who worked for Apple for two years before setting up her first company, Stitchio, in 2016. Three years older late in 2019, she helped launch the skincare brand - Nat Habit.

Natural skincare

Along with the design of the brand, Swagatika shares: "I have always been a big fan of well-being and natural life. I have been practicing yoga since I was eight years old. My father is a doctor and my grandfather was an agricultural expert, so in theory, My co-founder Gaurav Agarwal has a similar background, so we just thought we had to make natural skincare products because consumers want them, but no one makes such products."

Nat Habit manufactures skin care products like ubtans, face packs, henna paste, hair oils, cleansing balms, and others without chemical preservatives and all-natural ingredients. Because the products contain no artificial preservatives, they last between 30 days and three months, depending on the ingredients.

"You buy every cream or ointment in the market and you find it's chemically rich because it's impossible to do without chemicals. So we wanted to make these natural products that were possible from it." ahead, "said Swagatika Das.

Organic Skin Care - Fashion?

Currently, organic and Ayurvedic skincare products are attracting consumer interest. Beauty and health experts, as well as dermatologists, have repeatedly warned that so-called pure natural products are not always effective.

While many brands claim to be organic, most do not. "You buy every cream or ointment on the market and you find it's chemical-rich because without chemicals it's impossible to do.

"The only problem was that if you had to do everything natural, you had to clean it every day, as you do at home. We decided to go through that pain and realized that it could give us more benefits than other skincare products manufactured," he added.

Although people living in first- and second-class cities, because of overwork, time constraints, low-interest rates, choose, among other things, face-to-face packages purchased at the store instead of home-made bonds, the family Swagatika is still based on homemade soap.

"My 25-year-old cousin has never used soap in his life. We have great faith in ubtans, so it made us start," he said, adding that in 2019 when they launched their products as part of the investigation, they became very popular.

Addressing the challenge of nationwide supply is to ensure that products are safe for consumption.

Because Nat Habit products do not contain preservatives, Swagatika and Gaurav have been a major challenge to deliver across the country.

"Our products need to be stored in the refrigerator, so we could not take them out of Delhi and ship our goods. It was before COVID, and then the catastrophe hit us hard, so we had to shut it down completely because our products were brand new, so they break down very quickly," says Swagatika.

"It came to our notice that we were able to address the issue for 10 days without the need for cold storage. We have added natural preservatives such as Neem, Giloy, and others to our products at appropriate levels to protect them," adds one of the founders.

Nat Habit resumes operations in 2020 in October when the team discovered how to extend the shelf life of their products. Since cold storage is no longer needed, activation was able to deliver products across India.

Growth and investment

The company has grown 25 times in the last year, Svagatika said and delivers about 1.50,000 units a month. These products are certified by the AYUSH Government in the Ayurveda category.

In the first seven to eight months, Nat Habit started as a start-up. After that, he received funding from Whiteboard Capital. In March 2021, Sequoia Surge and business angels such as Paper Boat CEO Niraj Kakkar; Epigamia CEO Rohan Mirchandani; Co-founder of Yogabara Suhasini Sampath; Spencer Retail, MD Devendra Chawla; Suhail Samir, Executive Director of BharatPe; Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal also invested in the startup.

So far, it has raised two million dollars.

Fundraising for women's businesses
 Swagatika shares her fundraising experience as Nat Habit is her second business after Stitchio.

"When I was trying to fundraise for my previous startup, Stitchio, which was a social media startup dedicated to tech products in 2015, I felt like it might be a little difficult for the entire investment community to believe that women can run an adventure. But this time I was no different from investors - it's a surprising trend that the community has changed in the last five years.

"It is also a space for personal care in which investors believe in women more than men, and that is why I have probably not seen any doubt, but a woman entrepreneur in technology can face a problem of gender bias ”, she concludes Swagatika.