Our country, India, is famous for many things. We are the biggest democracy in the world, have the largest postal network and the most number of official languages that any country has. Apart from all these things, Ayurveda, the ancient branch of healthcare, is something which is known for being founded in India. The word Ayurveda is formed from two Sanskrit words Ayuh means life and Veda means knowledge or department of Science. Therefore, Ayurveda means knowledge of life. Despite being a centuries old method of curing diseases Ayurvedic (anything related to Ayurveda) texts have scattered references of Ayurvedic Remedies of all aspects of medicine and health. Its methods evolved in India and the basic principal remained true for all times and do not change from time to time.
After the recent pandemic, people somewhere started believing and tried to cope up with the health problems in a natural way. This brought back Ayurveda from libraries back to market, where people can consume sustainable and natural medicine with no side effect. To know more about how the market is transitioning and how newer generation is adapting Ayurveda, we talked to one of the industry experts, Shreedh Singh,Co-Founder and CEO of The Ayurveda Company.
How does The Ayurveda Company works? How is it trying to let people understand the value of Ayurveda?
The Ayurveda Company is based out of Gurugram, Haryana, and we are an Omni Channel Ayurvedic brand. We started last year, as a digital first brand, and are now expanding in the retail space too. We have our exclusive brand presence, retail outlets through which we have started selling offline as well.
We consider ourselves on a mission to take the Ayurveda to the masses and make it more accessible. Health products, especially in Ayurveda, should be delivered to the customer so that they can try them directly. Therefore, we try to be to be as close as possible to the customer. Currently we are working in five broad categories which are
How did you find the need of an Ayurvedic baby care range?
We conducted a survey on over 700 parents and couple expecting babies to find out what they think. We asked them what other people think about whether there should be some Ayurvedic products for the infants and babies or not? More than 91 percent of them said that, yes, there should be some products. They asserted on the point if any brand launches Ayurvedic products, they are open to them. If the product quality is good they would love to introduce their babies to Ayurveda.
How would you like to describe your journey; both in term of revenue and geo graphical presence?
The Covid-19 made the technology reach where it should have reached till 2025-26. That means whatever must have happened in upcoming three years happened in 2020 only. This farst forward journey forced a very interesting thing to happen. The content consumption, be it through YouTube, Instagram or any Online short video platforms, grew by 70 percent across the globe. It became easier for brands, like us, that were active digitally if we were selling the right things or giving good service. So, from revenue of 3 lakh in the month of Jan 2020, our revenue that we closed last year was about 21-20 Cr. and we are taking the target to close this financial year at 100 Cr.
How hard it is to let newer generation understand the value of Ayurveda?
When we talk about the Generation Z (GenZ) and millennial, most of the people say that it is hard to let them understand. I think we just need to give them time to understand things. GenZ youngsters are very much exposed to the information. In our time, we were not that much exposed. We used to ask our parents that why things happen but now youngsters can simply Google it and the proper answer will flashes on their screens in less than a second. Due to this easy access of information, the genZ is already smart they know what they want and they also are aware about their choices in future. Therefore, they tend to be harsh only on those who try to influence them or give them any wrong information. They instantly pull themselves backwards when someone tries to influence them incorrectly.
We tried to understand Both GenZs and millennial. A Common thread between both GenZs and Millennial is that they want to do well in the ecosystem. Whether for their own-selves or the family members, all they want to do is to do well. If you see in recent years, gifting on father’s day and mother’s day has increased a lot. This is because people started to value the relations and the bonds became stronger than ever. People have become closer. If we try understanding the generation Z and millennial, we will find that they want to change the world for a good cause they want to create something which is good and impactful in the long run. They also know that doing well for themselves should not be bad for anyone else. Because Ayurveda works on the same thinking, it does well without harming the nature, new generation feel connected to Ayurveda. We have tried impacting the emotional side (the personality side) and appeal it from that way.
Ayurveda is very much surrounded by myths. How are you trying to change this thing in people’s mind?
Indeed, positioning of Ayurveda has always been framed around myths. Myths like, it is very un-cool, orthodox and a very much grandfatherly image has been made of Ayurveda. Various people say it takes a lot time to heal, it is slow.
We understood the continuously falling attention span of normal human and tried to use it in our favour. Giving priority to the fact that brand name shall be as small as possible; we started calling The Ayurveda Company as TAC. We tried redefining the image of Ayurveda while taking care of not tampering the original concept. Thus TAC works on keeping the sole concept alive while coping-up with modern world problems.
We are also working on the image that has been made in the peoples mind, that it is slow, it won’t work as it is so old. We show them the percentage of result for their diseases; tell them that in 15 days you’ll get this sort of result with proven facts, researches and studies.
How do you see the future of Ayurveda in India?
I am a big believer of Ayurveda and this love is something that makes me believe it is going to thrive soon. On one side the conservation methods are said to make our life difficult while ayurveda isn’t among them. They way we are trying and people are accepting it is the ultimate solution for life problems. As the problems are growing, pollution and diseases are increasing, people are inclining more and more to it.
Yoga, which is just a small part of Ayurveda, is already became an industry now. Similarly, Ayurveda will also become a USD 100 billion industry in upcoming years. The industry is so big that whatever we have covered currently is not even 10 percent of it. All we need and are on our way to do is to create awareness about Ayurveda. We must understand and let the big population, residing not only in India but in other countries too, to explore and get benefits of Ayurveda.
Most of the companies take five years as milestone. What are your plans for upcoming five year?
Five year is a very long time; still, what we have planned is to come up with an IPO and have a public listed company. We understand that the journey to that aim will be full of ups and downs while being enriching and rewarding too. From a business expansion perspective, we will try to make a better mix of online and offline business.
We want to become the most customer loved brand by letting people know Ayurveda from TAC and TAC for Ayurveda. Also, we are getting a lot of international interests from dealers, distributors, franchisees and several big global supply chains. We will soon start working on that as well. This will help us reach in remote area too. For example, there is a person who stays in Australia and believes in Ayurveda. If he or she even thinks of buying and using ayurvedic products he cannot do it due to unavailability. Therefore, from a business perspective they reach out us for expansion abroad.
One thing I would like to add here is that we have currently put international expansion on hold because we are focussing on the national market only. From next year we will start looking for it but in this year we will be focussing of domestic expansion only.
