Robin Gupta on building Conscious Chemist

Written by: Deepa Somasunderam

He’s building a gender neutral beauty brand in India.

Welcome to our new series, the Foundery. Cult ingredients, beauty rituals, ancient medical systems: so much of the beauty industry is rooted in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean but usually when it comes to branding, entrepreneurship and mainstream industry recognition, we are left out of the conversation. So we spotlight innovative founders in and from these regions to build your brand awareness.

Conscious Chemist is an Indian beauty brand that delivers fun beauty products with clinical grade results. Their mission is working: their products are regularly rated the best and this year, their co-founder, Robin Gupta was included in the Forbes India 30 under 30 list.

2022 was quite a year for the company. Lotus Herbals (a large Indian cosmetics company) acquired a stake in Conscious Chemist and they launched 13 new products.

They create hyper-targeted products while staying clean and conscious. For example, a whopping 80% of Indians suffer from skin colour heterogeneity (mainly resulting from hyper-pigmented spots, melasma and ill-defined pigmented macules and dark circles) and Conscious Chemist are trying to solve this one product at a time. From their products like the body gel for keratosis pilaris, the retinol body cream and hybrid gel sunscreen: every product has been formulated to meet specific customer needs.

Hi Robin! You were in a completely different industry before entering beauty - what inspired this change?

Hi – so me and my co-founder Prakher were looking at a lot of categories before our journey in the beauty industry. A lot of ‘all natural’ ‘ayurveda’ ‘organic’ brands we saw were talking about ‘free-from’ claims whereas we saw a sharp contrast on what they claimed and what they delivered. We believe that life is a chemistry and consumers deserve the truth rather than fear mongering while making any purchase. We love results and ‘functionality’ is at the core of our formulations. The decision was not an impulsive one, it was a well-thought out move that we made after carefully considering the potential for growth and some meaningful impact that we could make via conscious chemist.

What does clean beauty mean to you?

Three Conscious Chemist body care products — @consciouschemistindia

Clean beauty is still open to interpretation. Claims such as natural, clean, green have no set definition as yet and are open to misuse. Terms like chemical-free or zero chemicals are misleading because all ingredients, whether natural or synthetic are made up of chemicals.

Clean beauty to us means responsible formulations and transparent labels without any misleading false buzzwords. Clean beauty doesn’t contain any mystery ingredient and certainly doesn’t claim to be something that it’s not. It also doesn’t have to be all-natural or 100% Chemical Free, we at Conscious Chemist believe in using safe actives, safe preservatives, safe synthetics and bring out the best efficacy through our formulations.

Why was it important for you to have a gender neutral brand?

Traditional gendered branding can reinforce harmful stereotypes and perpetuate gender inequality, we want to break down these stereotypes and promote a more equal and just society. We wanted to appeal to a wider audience and didn’t want to limit ourselves to specific gender since the basic principles of skincare apply to all the genders.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in launching a clean beauty brand in the Indian market?

We as young challenger brands face numerous challenges day in & day out. From finding the right manufacturing partner, to building the right team, sourcing the highest quality of ingredients to meet our quality standards, educating the consumers & yes competition from incumbents – it’s never ending.

Lotus Herbals acquired a stake in Conscious Chemist in 2022. What do you hope to achieve with this acquisition?

Lotus Herbals has a 3 decade old legacy in the Indian beauty ecosystem – with strong fundamentals, they have built a brand which is loved by millions of Indian consumers. They come with a lot of relevant expertise in the space that we’re building conscious chemist and we’re glad to have them onboard.

Conscious Chemist multi hyaluronic gel cream blue bottle — @consciouschemistindia

Are most of your sales online or do you also stock in stores? Do you have international shipping to any countries?

Yes, currently 95% of our sales are online. We’ve recently started our offline journey with a beauty specific retail chain – ‘Health & Glow’ in their stores located in Chennai, Bangalore, Kochi, Mumbai etc. We are working on adding more retail touchpoints in the next 12 months.

We have also just made our products available on Amazon US.

Why is it important to you to provide the shelf life of products?

Providing the shelf life of beauty products is important for helping consumers make informed decisions, and building trust and credibility with them. We generally have a 24 month shelf life for our products.