Making beauty products that are good not just for human skin but also the earth

Over the past few years, Earth Rhythm has gone from a homegrown soap and shampoos brand to a full-fledged D2C platform for sustainable beauty and wellness.

Founder Harini Sivakumar began making soaps because she couldn’t find anything in the market that could help her older child who had a specific skin condition. After selling homemade soaps through local markets, Sivakumar took the entrepreneurial plunge with Earth Rhythm. She decided to convert her passion into a full-fledged business, and her first customers came through kiosks and stalls at various exhibitions.

In the previous financial year (ending March 2021), the beauty brand reported INR 6 Cr in revenue. From around 2,000 to 3,000 orders every month in 2021, Earth Rhythm has scaled up to around 15,000 orders a month in January 2022. This has come on the back of a 3x growth in visitors to its native platform.

Earth Rhythm’s products help to solve multiple skin and hair care issues such as pigmentation, fine lines, dehydrated skin, hairfall, dandruff, and much more. The company’s formulations are created in-house by trained cosmeticians and chemists, backed by cited scientific and medical research. Besides this, the products are certified by ECOCERT, which is one of the world’s largest certifying bodies for natural cosmetics.

After running Earth Rhythm, predominantly as a home-based setup, for a couple of years, Sivakumar decided to scale up. From its first product — shampoo bars — today, the company has 160 SKUs in unique formats across face, hair, body and general makeup and cosmetics. The company’s top-selling products in the past couple of years have been the ‘Murumuru Butter’ shampoo bar, sunscreen with SPF50, a phyto ceramide moisturiser, lip masques and tints for lips and the cheek. Besides beauty products, it has ventured into zerowaste accessories such as ecofriendly toothbrushes, soapdishes, combs, vanity bags and more that tie into the sustainability angle.

Sivakumar says the company has an interesting pipeline of new products, which, according to internal research, are potential game changers. The startup is closed to becoming one of the rare plastic-neutral brands in India in the cosmetics space. The commitment to reducing the carbon footprint and actively seeking sustainable ingredients is a big part of the Earth Rhythm promise, says Sivakumar. So the focus for the next-gen products will be on biodegradability and recyclable packaging.