How To Start A Beauty Brand In India: 6 Lessons From Karmic Beauty’s Founders
India’s beauty and personal care market is estimated at $26 to $32 billion in 2025 and is forecast to approach $48 billion by 2034.[1] Numbers like that bring a steady stream of new names into the skincare industry. Every new beauty founder arrives with a product idea, a mood board and a launch date, only to realise that there is much more to building a beauty brand than what meets the eye.
Dr. Vaibhav Mittal and Komal Mittal spent more than two decades in and around the beauty industry before launching Skin Longevity brand Karmic Beauty with a portfolio spanning skincare, haircare and scalp care. The company has since been named Best Emerging D2C Brand of the Year at the e4m D2C Awards 5.0.
The six lessons below come from those years and each applies whether you are formulating a face serum in a small lab or drafting the business plan for your first beauty startup.
1. Study The Best Products In The World Before You Build Your Own
Dr. Vaibhav Mittal’s early career sat inside premium international organisations and that corporate experience shaped how he approaches strategy and consumer insight. In beauty, he spent the following decade travelling to South Korea, Japan, Italy, France, Hong Kong, Vietnam and the United States. The itinerary was built around ingredient exhibitions, formulation conferences and cosmetic trade fairs. Alongside the travel, he imported and sold products from manufacturers in Israel, the UK and South Korea.
Handling finished products from other markets teaches you things that even the best business school cannot. You see how a benchmark formulation feels in the hand, how it is priced and packaged, what the supplier behind it considers standard and where the gaps still are. Those years also gave the founders direct relationships with raw material suppliers around the world, which later translated into ethical and premium ingredient sourcing for Karmic Beauty.
Anyone asking how to start a skincare brand in India can run a smaller version of the same experiment. Buy the Korean skincare products and European serums you admire. Read every ingredient list. Study the texture, packaging, price and claims. Then ask the less comfortable questions. What need is this product actually meeting? Does something similar already exist? Why would someone choose yours?
The point is not to copy what already works. It is to understand the standard you are entering the market against before you decide what your own standard will be.
2. Start With A Frustration, Then Find Out If It Belongs To More People
Komal Mittal was always a very discerning customer herself and she had a clear sense of the standards she wanted from the products she used. Her sensitive & reactive skin gave her a short checklist. A product had to be gentle, well tested and free from silicones. Over more than ten years, she went through tubes of European, South Korean and American skincare brands but nothing seemed to work on her skin.
What started as a personal search soon became a larger question for the founders. Were Komal and Dr. Vaibhav’s experiences unique or were other consumers struggling to make sense of increasingly complex skincare routines too? As their conversations with consumers grew, they began hearing versions of the same concern. People were using several actives from different brands, trying to work out what could be layered together, what worked well in combination and what might be responsible when their skin became sensitive.
Across 12,000 customer conversations, 10,000 product reviews and 500 direct messages, the pattern became increasingly clear. Consumers had more access to advanced skincare than ever but many were still trying to figure out how all of it worked together. They realised that consumers today are over-equipped and under-guided.
A founder’s personal frustration can be the beginning of a product idea but it only becomes a business opportunity when you find the same frustration outside your home.
3. Test The Finished Formula, Not Just The Ingredient
Photobiome™, the active in Karmic Beauty’s Longevity Sunscreen, has received six international awards. Those awards belong to the raw ingredient. We still wanted to know what happened when that ingredient had to work inside our finished formulation.
Karmic Beauty’s Longevity Sunscreen SPF 50+ PA++++ went through numerous iterations around texture, filter compatibility and wear before we were satisfied with how it behaved as a complete product. We tested it across different skin types because an ingredient can have an impressive body of research behind it and still behave differently once it enters a real formulation.
That distinction is easy to overlook when an ingredient arrives with an impressive awards shelf or a compelling scientific story. But as a founder, you have to remember that the consumer does not buy the ingredient. They buy the formula.
For us, this was where the real work began. We had an ingredient with a strong story on paper but we still had to make it work on skin, under makeup, in heat, through everyday wear and within a formula that people would actually want to use every morning. That meant going back to the formulation table again and again until the science and the experience of using the product met each other.
Due to this, our longevity sunscreen formulation provides 43% additional defence against photoageing compared with a standard SPF 50+ PA++++ sunscreen.
4. Have A Differentiator You Are Willing To Build The Hard Way
There is a much quicker way to get a beauty product to market. Start with an existing base, add your chosen actives, adjust the fragrance and texture, put your name on the pack and move towards production but that stood against everything we learnt over the past 2 decades.
We developed our formulations from the ground up, including the base, because we wanted control over how the ingredients worked together and how the finished product behaved in texture, stability and performance on skin and scalp. Reaching launch took more than 100 formulation iterations and more than 200 research papers. Scale-up added another layer of testing because a formula that behaves perfectly in a small laboratory batch can behave very differently when production volumes change.
Some failures cost us months. A batch would not behave as expected, a texture would not hold, an ingredient would not perform the way we wanted it to, or something that looked right at laboratory scale would need to be reconsidered at production scale. We went back, found the problem, reformulated and tested again.
Finding manufacturing partners in India who shared our commitment to high-quality ingredients and international standards was another early challenge. There are a plethora of capable facilities in the country. The harder part is finding partners willing to keep experimenting with you when the easier option is to tell you that the existing base is good enough.
That is also why we believe a founder needs to decide their non-negotiables before they start speaking to manufacturers. Our standards around ingredients, sourcing, formulation and packaging were established early, so that production could work around those standards rather than the other way around.
We avoid volatile silicones wherever an alternative can do the same job and we consider wastewater impact when making formulation decisions. Our sourcing includes ECOCERT- and USDA-certified organic raw materials, with up to 91.8% of ingredients of natural and organic origin. We also built Karmic Beauty as a US FDA-registered business.
The common thread is simple. If something matters to the brand, we want to build it into the process from the beginning.
5. Know What You Stand For And Stand Against
Building a science-led beauty company requires more than knowing what you want to create. It also means being clear about what you do not want to build.
For us, that meant challenging the logic of skincare built around harsh exfoliators and increasingly aggressive actives. Visible results can be compelling but we do not believe the pursuit of faster results should come at the cost of the skin’s ability to recover. Some approaches can ask the skin to give more than it can sustainably afford and that is not the kind of beauty we want to build.
This thinking became one of the foundations of Karmic Beauty. We wanted to develop longevity formulations that support the skin through multiple biological pathways with recovery, barrier health and resilience considered alongside visible results.
6. Choose A Name That Gives The Business Something To Live Up To
The name Karmic Beauty comes from karma but for us, it is fundamentally about cause and effect.
What we do today creates an outcome somewhere down the line. That is true of businesses, relationships, habits and, in our case, skin.
Every day, skin responds to what we expose it to and how we care for it. Some effects are immediate. Others accumulate in isolation, becoming visible much later. The absence of an immediate consequence does not mean the action has disappeared. It is still part of the equation.
That became the thinking behind Karmic Beauty. We wanted the name to reflect the way we think about skin itself. Every formulation, every ingredient and every choice becomes part of a longer chain of cause and effect.
It also gives us something to live up to. If we believe skin remembers what we give it, then we have to be thoughtful about what we put into our formulations and what we ask people to put on their skin every day.
Citations
- IMARC Group, "India Beauty and Personal Care Market Size, Share, Trends and Forecast 2026-2034." https://www.imarcgroup.com/india-beauty-personal-care-market
