Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Mamaearth (Honasa Consumer) | Founded 2016 | Gurugram
In 2014, Ghazal Alagh had a newborn son, a career as a corporate trainer, and a growing love of painting. She did not have a business plan. What she had was a problem she could not solve: almost every baby product she put on her son’s skin gave him a rash.
Her search for something safe became Mamaearth. Six years later it was India’s first unicorn of 2022, and the company behind it went on to list on the stock exchange.
A middle-class beginning
Ghazal grew up in a middle-class family in Chandigarh. She studied computer science and began her career as a corporate trainer at NIIT, teaching programming and database skills such as SQL and Oracle to managers and engineers at large companies, including Infosys.
She has never been shy about where she comes from. Speaking on a podcast in 2024 about Mamaearth’s early spending, she laughed: “Hum log itni middle class family se aatein hai, humse paise diye hi nahi jaatein bina baat ke.” We come from such a middle-class family that we simply can’t spend money without reason.
In 2011, she married Varun Alagh, an engineer and XLRI graduate who had worked at Hindustan Unilever, Diageo and Coca-Cola. The same year, her childhood interest in painting returned. In 2013 she went to New York for an intensive figurative art course at the New York Academy of Art. It was there, while studying painting, that she first began reading about the chemicals that go into everyday beauty products.
Agastya
Her son Agastya was born in August 2014. He had a skin condition, and many of the baby products available in India made it worse.
Ghazal and Varun began reading labels. They found ingredients they did not want anywhere near a baby. Safer products had to be imported, and that brought its own problems. They were expensive, and many arrived with only two or three months left before expiry. More than half of what they bought expired before they could use it.
“Motherhood kind of changed my life forever, I would say,” she told Entrepreneur India.
If they were struggling, they reasoned, other parents must be too.
700 conversations
In 2016, Ghazal and Varun co-founded Honasa Consumer, the company behind Mamaearth. They left salaried jobs and put in their own savings, then raised more from friends and family. Their parents helped them through the early months.
Before making a single product, Ghazal set out to listen. She has said she spoke to around 700 mothers to understand what worried them, what they were buying, and what they could not find. Those conversations shaped everything that came next.
In December 2016, Mamaearth launched with six baby care products, including a toxin-free body lotion and a mosquito repellent. The repellent became a bestseller on Amazon within months. Each product was certified by MADE SAFE, a US non-profit that screens products for harmful ingredients.
Their goal, at the start, was modest: to help about 1,000 parents.
When no store would stock them
Getting Mamaearth onto shelves proved impossible at first. “Nobody wanted to keep us in physical stores. It’s as simple as that,” Ghazal said.
So the brand went where it could. For its first six to eight months, Mamaearth sold only on online marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart and Nykaa. It did not even have its own website.
To be heard, Ghazal turned to the people she understood best. There was no Instagram culture of influencers then, but there were parenting bloggers. “At that time, there was no Instagram but bloggers, I made friends with them,” she recalled. She sent them free samples and built a group she called the “Board of Moms,” mothers who tried the products and spoke about them honestly.
“When a mother tells another mother of experience, that has the most trust,” she said.
Being a new brand was hard in other ways, too. “Nobody takes you seriously initially,” she told YourStory. The founders had to convince manufacturers, vendors and investors, and sometimes even the parents of people they wanted to hire.
Through all of it, she kept one picture in mind. “Everytime I felt that things were getting difficult, I would remember his face,” she said of her son.
From babycare to a house of brands
Early backing came from Kanwaljit Singh’s Fireside Ventures. Then customers began asking for more. About two years after launch, around 2018, Mamaearth moved into skincare and haircare.
“Suddenly, from operating in babycare, which was fairly small, we started playing in FMCG and beauty and personal care, which was 10x larger,” Ghazal told Business Today.
Inside the company, she took on the role of Chief Innovation Officer, leading product development, the community of mothers around the brand, and new brands. She is known for sampling products from every batch herself.
New brands followed. The Derma Co launched in 2020 and Aqualogica in 2021. Honasa bought a majority stake in the parenting platform Momspresso in December 2021, acquired the salon brand BBlunt from Godrej in February 2022, and took a majority stake in Dr. Sheth’s in May 2022. Investors including Sequoia, Sofina and actor Shilpa Shetty backed the company along the way.
At the very start of 2022, a round led by Sequoia valued Honasa at $1.2 billion. Mamaearth was India’s first unicorn of the year.
“In the beginning, we had no notion of becoming a unicorn,” she said.
Shark Tank, and a second son
That same winter, Ghazal became a household name. She was one of the judges on the first season of Shark Tank India, which aired from December 2021 to February 2022. She was pregnant when she was offered the show, and said yes partly to show that life and work can go hand in hand. Her second son, Ayaan, was born in March 2022.
She was named in Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen list in 2022. She has also become an angel investor, backing women-led startups such as Uvi Health and BlissClub.
Going public, and a hard year
In December 2022, Honasa filed to go public. Reports of a ₹24,000 crore valuation drew heavy criticism online. Ghazal did not hide from it. “That was our mistake and we own it,” she said.
The IPO, priced more modestly, raised ₹1,701 crore and was subscribed 7.61 times. Honasa listed on 7 November 2023, opening about 2% above its issue price.
A year later came the hardest quarter in the company’s history. In November 2024, Honasa reported a loss after cleaning up its distribution system and taking back excess stock from distributors. The stock fell sharply over two days.
The company recovered. In FY26, Honasa reported revenue of about ₹2,392 crore and a profit of ₹200 crore, nearly three times the year before.
The brand that began with one baby’s rash now sits in millions of Indian homes. And the person behind it still describes the starting point the same way: a mother who could not find something safe, and decided to make it herself.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: The Better India (May 2022); Entrepreneur India (May 2022); YourStory (January 2022, August 2023); Business Today (January 2022, March 2023, February 2024); Storyboard18; Business Standard (February 2022, November 2024); TechCrunch (November 2023); Inc42 (May 2026); Honasa Consumer.
