For Delhi-based Arata, building a personal care brand in a crowded market has meant fundamentally rethinking the way the market works, even as others continue to tread the familiar path.
“When we started Arata, the haircare market in India was built on two extremes: heritage Ayurvedic claims with no clinical backing, or mass FMCG products optimised for shelf life and margins, not results. We built Arata on the belief that hair and scalp care deserved the same rigour as skincare, ingredients that were tested, dosed correctly, and backed by actual research, not marketing language borrowed from a grandmother’s remedy,” Dhruv Bhasin, co-founder of Arata, explains.
The struggle, and turning point
Since its launch in 2017, Arata has witnessed a rollercoaster ride, with both co-founders, Dhruv Bhasin and Dhruv Madhok, pitching their business to whoever was ready to listen. And then came the opportunity that changed everything- their Shark Tank appearance in 2024.
“Pitching to that panel forces you to defend your business in front of people who have built and sold companies many times over, and they ask the questions that customers and competitors are also quietly asking, just out loud and on camera. It sharpened how we talked about our numbers, our unit economics, and our differentiation, because vague answers do not survive that room. The other lesson was about distribution of trust. Lakhs of people who had never heard of Arata saw the founders, heard the story, and decided to try the product in the same week. That kind of instant credibility is hard to manufacture through marketing alone. It taught us that storytelling and proof have to travel together, and that lesson directly shaped how we are building Arata, leading with the founders and the science, not hiding behind the product shot,” Dhruv Madhok says,
Standing out from the crowd
For this haircare startup, customized targeting has been Arata’s biggest differentiating factor.
“Most of the category is fighting over the same territory, who can promise the fastest visible result. Almost every product in our range, from a damage defence shampoo to an anti-grey serum to a sunscreen, is designed to stop a problem before it becomes irreversible, rather than put a band-aid on it after the fact. The other differentiator is in creating depth. We are not a single hero SKU brand riding one viral product. We have built a wide enough portfolio, hair fall, dandruff, greying, hair health, that we can genuinely be the one haircare brand for an entire household, while every individual product still has to clear the same clinical bar. In a crowded market, the brands that survive are the ones whose claims hold up under scrutiny,” Dhruv Bhasin says.
Innovation strategy
Arata has been working to meet changing customer perceptions, where customers are willing to try a new brand based on what it could offer.
“Five years ago, a customer would accept ‘natural” or “Ayurvedic’ as a complete answer. Today they want to know the mechanism, what is the active ingredient, what is its concentration, and what does the clinical study actually show. That is exactly the conversation we have always wanted to have, so our R&D approach has not had to pivot, it has had to go deeper. The willingness to experiment only works in our favour if the experimentation is backed by something real, so our innovation roadmap is now built backwards from the science, not forwards from a trend,” he explains.
Addressing concerns, busting myths
For Mr Bhasin, educating his customers has been the biggest ace up his sleeve.
“Education is not a marketing tactic for us, it is the trust mechanism itself. A customer who understands why a product works is far more loyal than one who simply liked an ad, because she can defend her own choice to herself the next time a cheaper or louder option shows up in her feed. The biggest misconception is still that hair fall and greying are purely cosmetic problems you treat once you notice them, rather than biological processes that begin much earlier at the follicle and cellular level. People are used to thinking in terms of correction: my hair is thinning, so I need a thickening product, right now. Very few consumers think in terms of prevention, protecting the follicle before it goes dormant, protecting the melanocyte before it depletes, protecting the hair fibre before daily washing and styling cause cumulative damage.
We would rather be the brand that tells you the inconvenient truth and gives you a better alternative than the one that just nods along,”
Balancing profitability and growth
Though Arata has managed to carve a niche in the highly competitive haircare segment, the company still struggles to balance profitability with growth.
“The discipline we have tried to hold ourselves to is being deliberate about where every rupee of acquisition spend goes, treating quick commerce, marketplaces, and performance marketing as genuinely different battlegrounds with different economics, rather than running one blanket strategy and hoping it works everywhere,” Mr Dhruv Madhok said.
Moving ahead, Arata is now aiming to become a brand that offers science-backed hair and scalp solutions.
“Arata is moving from being a brand known for individual hair-fix products to being the brand that owns the science of hair and scalp health at a cellular level, in a category that has barely scratched the surface of that conversation.
If we get this right, the next generation of Indian consumers will not think of haircare as a quick fix they reach for in a panic, they will think of it as something backed by real science that they trust enough to build into their everyday routine, the way Arata has been arguing for since day one,” he concludes.
<p>The post Arata: Offering science-backed haircare solutions for everyone first appeared on Hello Entrepreneurs.</p>
