Building Kama Ayurveda with Vivek Sahni, Co-founder & CEO

Welcome to a really exciting episode of the Indian Dream - we've wanted to talk to this founder for the past 1 year at least. In this episode, we speak to Vivek Sahni, co-founder and CEO of Kama Ayurveda. For the few listeners who haven't heard of Kama, they are an Ayurveda based Hair & Beauty brand that now has 59 retail stores across the country.

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The reason we love Kama Ayurveda so much is that they started in 2002 at a time when nobody spoke about Ayurveda or even cared about it. They are pioneers who saw the early signals of the clean beauty movement and the resurgence of Ayurveda in India and staked a claim. This 20 year journey has culminated in Kama becoming one of the best known beauty brands to come out of India with a reported 100cr investment by a Spanish Luxury brand.

I'll give you a quick history about Kama and Vivek before we jump right into the conversation with him.

The journey to Kama started in 1993 when Vivek moved back to India after studying Design at the Parson's School of Design in New York. After coming back, he started a design studio called Vivek Sahni designs with his partner David Chang. Fun fact - Vivek and Dave ran this design studio all the way to 2013. For the first 10 years of Kama Ayurveda's existence, it was just a side hustle.

In 1998 - Vivek worked on a 2 year project to design gift packaging for Khadi India, a government organisation set up to promote the development of Khadi and village industries in rural areas. During this project, they helped create a range of products, protocols, worked with manufacturers, and helped train people to source the best products

This experience with Khadi India drove the founding of Kama Ayurveda in 2002 as an authentically Indian brand that was steeped in the traditions of Ayurveda. Kama had 4 founders, Vivek Sahni, Dave Change, interior designer Vikram Goyal and Padma Shri awardee Rajshree Pathy. It was Rajshree's connection with Ayurvedic doctors in Coimbatore that led them down the path of Ayurveda.

The actual product development took them nearly 2 years and in the end, they started with a range hair and skin products that were authentically Ayurvedic. From 2002 to 2012, Vivek spent about 30% of his time on Kama while the rest was spent on his design studio. The brand grew organically increasing its distribution across pharmacies and hotels in Delhi.

We now jump into the conversation with Vivek around 2005 2006, when they got distribution as in-room amenities at Oberoi and The Park hotels and how that impact the brand.

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