A Day at Krya

It is 12:15 pm and I am putting the last touches on the Krya Classic Plus Bodywash formulation. I look at the last sets of customer feedback we recieved and my formulation notes, before asking the team to open a fresh batch of Pure red Sandalwood powder .

This herb comes to us from the Kerala Forest Department andis extremely expensive, yet so good for prickly, Pitta inflammed skin.

How Did I Get Here?

How did I get here? I ask myself, as I stare at a newly opened Word document which has the title “Introducing Preethi” which I have opened for this blog post and haven’t finished writing. 

Hello, my name is Preethi Sukumaran, and I am building Krya. We research, formulate, manufacture and sell hair, skin and home care products formulated completely on Classical Ayurvedic principles . Basically the purest, cleansest and best for you products you could ever hope to see.

The Accidental Entrepreneur

If you asked me as a child, or even during my 2 years at IIM Calcutta during my PGDM, if I wanted to be an Entrepreneur, the answer would have been a loud resounding no. I always thought of myself as a person who would find one company, work in it, grow in it and one day retire in it, possibly resembling the furniture there at some point.

Instead after 2 years of literally searching my soul at B school figuring out what I wanted to do, I joined an FMCG company as a Management trainee. As I worked myself slowly up the corporate ladder across different roles and brands, I discovered 2 things:

I absolutely loved building brands. And I absolutely loathed what I was building as a Brand Manager.

I discover that I am living 2 lives

So during the entire time I was learning sales,working in large organisations, and building brands, I was also living (duh!).And I started making extremely particular choices as I established my own home as a young working adult.

I started learning to eat cleaner, choose more sustainable product around me. I had given up leather at 19, and stuck to that choice. I decided to take up Martial arts to improve my self confidence and assertiveness, and during all of this, I started to understand that health and wellness was a series of choices we made everyday – not the big ones, the little choices we made everyday: like what we chose to eat, how we structured our day, how we responded to circumstances. Basically every little choice.

As I started building a stronger, more sustainable, healthier life questioning every choice I made, at work, I was building generic, regular brands.

Most brands in FMCG continue to be me-too. They are largely differentiated by packaging and a few product sensorials like how the product foams, its texture, its appearance and its fragrance. Possibly even how retentive the fragrance is and maybe even if it creates the bathroom bloom that FMCG marketeers engineer — so your bathroom smells of the product after you’ve used it

But inherently within the product? It is me-too, generic. But more importantly – it does nothing for your skin or hair. It cant improve your health, wellbeing or skin in any way.

But here’s what started making me uncomfortable: the products I worked on in my job, werent just harmless products that didnt make a difference. With regular use, every skin and hair care product we were marketing could have the potential to do more harm over time.

Every time we made a SLS based cleansing product, added mineral oil into our hair serums, added silicones into our lotions or approved a complex fragrance for the products,we were creating mini problems. Everytime we created an artificial flavour that went into our so called healthy snacks, we were creating a problem.

For the soil, water, air, aquatic organisms and our end consumers.

And the second issue? I didnt want to use the products I was marketing 🙁 As my personal tastes evolved, I found I did not want to eat these artificially flavoured snacks, or use the silicone laden hair serum for myself.

I was being 2 different people: at work and at home.

I realise large organisations are resistant to change 🙂

The idea of leading 2 lives was deeply abhorrent to me. I considered myself an honest and ethical person, so the fix I came up with?

To change the thinking in the organisation I worked in, and make the brands I worked on much more forward thinking. I figured that even if the brands couldn’t get as radical as I imagined them immediately, at least I could work on a small start and slowly peg away until we made the products incremental better.

So I started taking a lot of research reports to my bosses and putting together massive decks on product improvements and ideas. I proposed making our shampoos SLS and SleS free , and showed them the resistance these ingredients were having from customers across the world.

I figured the organization would be quick to spot a new trend and atleast make a small test launch where we could attempt using cleanser ingredients.

Turns out, most large organizations are wedded to the idea of profits today. And new, unpredictable turns in the way product were made would put today’s profits at risk. And end up being more expensive in the short run as you attempted to market the change to customers .

And while young Brand Managers ideas and energy were great – an organisation couldn’t do a complete 180 degree turn based on one person’s idea.

So the innovations I proposed ended up getting more and more diluted. and in every meeting I was told that these ideas were too futuristic and forward thinking. That they wouldn’t work at the moment in India.

I conclude that if I wanted to see a change I had to do it myself

So the one thing people ask me is if I had an Aha moment before I decided to quit and become an enterpreneur. I didnt have that – I know it doesnt make for exciting copy ro headlines!

But I think I had a series of mini aha moments. Every evening would see me looking dispirited after one of my fervent pitches to change something at my organisation. I would sit in my balcony, sip on chai, look into the horizon and tell myself: “If I were running a brand, I would do this.” And I would wait for Srini to come back home and explain my whole idea, in great detail to him. My ideas became sharper and more vivid. Now when I said “If I were running this brand”, I was able to imagine everything — the packaging, what it would say, the advertising, and even imagine what consumers would say after using this magical product.

I now realise I was manifesting this in the purest and most honest way possible, without even understanding what I was doing. After 2.5 years of this, a point came in my life when I decided I wanted to stop dreaming and start doing.

Since no one else was building my dream company with my specific ideals, I realised I had to build it myself.

So in mid-2008, I started talking to my bosses about quitting, and in January 2009, I had quit my job. I guess I had convinced someone about my why, because as it turned out, Srini decided to quit with me to start something that could potentially change the world.

We decide that the best way to start a company is to first unlearn everything we learned

February 1st 2009 was the first day of my new life. And I woke up in a state of absolute panic. After 8 years of having every day planned and a steady salary coming in every month, with every career move well planned, for the first time in my life, I had nowhere to go and nothing to do.

And I did not like it. In utter and absolute panic, I aked Srini if we could pitch our services as Marketing consultants until we figured out what we wanted to do. Because as it turned out, I didn’t have a set and solid busines splan to start as soon as I quit.

With our good reputation and educational background, a senior business leader reached out asking us to put a proposal together to lead marketing for one of their new initiatives. As I opened the laptop and clicked on MS Presentation, I could feel my heart sink.

Here I was, doing exactly what I promised myself I wouldn’t do: make yet another CYA presentation for yet another incremental brand which had no plans of changing anything, not even the fonts used in the presentation.

I needed a short break, I decided. So I started planning a small trip somewhere in India. Maybe in a mountain home for a month while I thought about what I wanted to do.

A Sale in a Bookstore changes my plans

In the 3 weeks I decided I needed a break, Srini and I discussed where we would travel. We had spent 3 weeks a couple of years ago in Uttarakhand and absolutely loved the state. Should we do an extended trip there, we wondered. After all, the seed to quit and start something new was definitely sown during our previous holiday.

But would it really be mind-opening to visit the same places? As we debated this, one afternoon we found ourselves in our favourite bookstore.

On that day, they were having a huge sale on their travel guides, specifically on a bunch of Lonely Planets’. So we picked up a huge stash of Lonely Planets’ and came back home. The stash was all around us at home. As we looked at pictures of apple-cheeked children in Kazakhstan and scenic lakes in Ireland, something started clicking in Srini’s mind.

A few weeks later, he proposed a trip that would change our lives. A three-month trip, but this time across Europe. Staying in cities of our choice: Paris, London, Barcelona. I proposed we don’t do the tourist version but instead do the native version. That we would stay at least a week in each city so we could experience it like a native.

And we did just that. 108 days in Europe across London, Paris, Rome, Florence, Barcelona & Madrid. In every city we stayed atleats a week. In some we stayed a whole month (hello Paris and Madrid). We rented a flat (not a hotel roo), and lived there – cooked, shopped, travelled and really lived.

Despite my increasing nervousness at traveling in Euros, from my INR savings and having no job to go back to, I was convinced by Srinivas’ wisdom on doing this trip.

If I wanted to change the world and build a legacy, he reasoned, I needed to see things form a completely fresh perspective. And really broaden my horizons. Which living in Europe for a short while did for me.

We continued to be on horizon boroadening mode when we came back to Chennai. Trips to Rishikesh and Goa followed as we continued to argue, ideate and imagine what we would like to build.

We come up with 2 business ideas per founder at the end of a year

At the end of that eventful year, Srini and I each came up with a business idea apiece. Our agreement was that we would each support each other’s idea. If both took off simultaneously, we would figure out how to work on both.

But the whole idea here was to partner each other in a strong legacy based idea. Each of us would do our best to dream of the exact challenge we wanted to solve and the Alternate Universe we wanted to see with our vision coming to Life.

Srini chose an idea around Art & Cinema. I chose an idea around Personal care . We discussed each idea threadbare over cups of coffeee and filled a large notebook with our vision around the idea. I still have my notebook and the vision behind what I imagined for Krya in 2008 (fun fact – we are proceeding pretty much accoridng to my original vision!)

We get mad at our Agency and work on the second idea instead

2010 was a super Intense year. And I Mean I N T E N S E. Srini and I worked hard on our ideas. I started researching personal care products, asking myself about alternatives. And started building what would become a MASSIVE library of textbooks and reference material on personal care.

Srini started working on his idea – a Cinema appreciation digital product (way before such things existed) and ideantified an agency to help him develop th course material

As both of us pledged to work on each other’s ideas as the working co-founder, an extremely intense period of work forllowed. At some points in the day, I was writing long essays after watching French cinema. At other points I was studying the properties of a surfactant in a soap and trying to come up with alternatives to how we could cleanse skin.

It helped that I was intensely into skin care and hair care throughout my working life. My last job had actually been to launch a line of turmeric based skin acre rpoducts . Around that time I had got closely incolved with the nascent organic food moevement. So I would keep coming across natural, sustainable alternatives in persoal care – many of the products lacked the sensorials, and experience I was used to in big box personal care. But when I was working on my idea in 2010, it felt like everything I had ever done until that point prepared me for this.

Meanwhile Srini’s idea was not proceeding well. Our money had started flowing out to the Agency, and iteration after iteration, was, to put it mildly, depressing. We would come back after every meeting feeling dispirited after spending nearly 3 hours explaining what we wanted. As it turns out, we were trying to work on an arthouse Eurpoean cinema product with an Agency who didnt really understand the genre. so what they came back with was, Basic.

Sometime in August 2011, was the last straw. After one more lacklustre meeting, Srini was throughly dispirited and frustrated. And he decided to take a break from working on his idea . And decdied to plunge full time into working on mine.

The agency of course was fired .

The story continues in part 2…

Thank you for reading this far — you are basically awesome. Part 2 of this story has many twists and turns too. You’ll read about the berry that changed my life and helped me start Krya. It lands here next week.