Hibiscus Monkey Walked So Others Could Run: India's Body Care Revolution Started Here

While India's beauty brands were racing to launch the next peptide serum or retinol cream in 2021, three women were placing a contrarian bet that would quietly reshape an entire category. At a time when "skincare" meant "face care" and body care meant whatever was on sale at the supermarket, Hibiscus Monkey launched with a radical proposition: your body deserves the same treatment as your face.

Advertisment

The Bet Nobody Else Would Take

The founding story reads like a masterclass in contrarian thinking. Mona, a chartered accountant and former corporate banker, joined forces with her twin daughters: Roshni is a dual MBA-MPP from MIT & Harvard and previously worked for the Government of India, and Naina completed her bachelor’s in engineering at MIT and her MBA at Harvard and was formerly working at Unilever in marketing. This founding team could have easily played it safe. They could have launched another vitamin C serum or another Korean beauty dupe.

Instead, they looked at India's beauty landscape and asked a simple question: Why does innovation stop at the neck?

"Indian consumers deserve better," the sisters said upon returning home after a decade in the US. But they weren't interested in importing Western trends or chasing viral TikTok ingredients. They saw a category that retail had ignored, that consumers had neglected, and that no brand had claimed. So they claimed it. 

Advertisment

The Uphill Battle of Changing Minds

Understanding Hibiscus Monkey's achievement requires understanding what they're up against. In India, a Rs 800 body wash isn't just expensive—it's culturally radical. In a market where the "chalta hai" attitude reigns for anything below the neckline, where bodies are covered and faces are photographed, convincing someone to invest in a Rs 800 body wash or a Rs 700 foot balm requires nothing short of a cultural shift. 

"When we entered the body care space in India, we were alone," Mona reflects. "It wasn't enough to just have great products. We had to invest significant time de-conditioning the consumer and re-educating them on how they needed to rightfully spend on their body care."

“This is the kind of market-building work that typically falls to legacy brands with decades of consumer trust, established distribution and deep pockets to educate an entire market from scratch,” said Naina. This is certainly not what you’d expect from a scrappy startup run by three women with no venture capital fanfare behind them. Yet Hibiscus Monkey understood something crucial: pioneers don't wait for permission.

Face-Grade Formulations for Your Entire Body

Their founding philosophy was disarmingly simple: "If we wouldn't apply it on our face, it shouldn't go on our body." This single principle revolutionized how Hibiscus Monkey approached formulation. “Suddenly, body care wasn't about heavily fragranced lotions with filler ingredients. It was about treating keratosis pilaris on arms with the same seriousness as treating acne on faces. It was about bringing salicylic acid and squalene, typically only limited to face creams and serums, to body moisturizers,” Roshni reflects.

While most brands are content to sell you body washes pumped with sulfates and body moisturisers packed with artificial fragrances, Hibiscus Monkey is formulating targeted solutions — in shower body moisturizer for strawberry skin, skin microbiome-friendly body wash, ingrown hair treatment that actually works!

Education as Revolution

But product innovation alone doesn't build categories. Consumer education does. And this is where Hibiscus Monkey's strategy becomes truly sophisticated.

Scroll through their Instagram and you won't find the typical beauty brand playbook of celebrity partnerships. Instead, you'll find the founders themselves breaking down the science of keratosis pilaris, explaining why your body needs exfoliation just like your face, demonstrating the difference between chemical and plant-based surfactants.

In one particular post, they compared an 800ml body wash retailing for Rs 300 to a 100ml face wash retailing for Rs 900 and seamlessly explained how filler ingredients and cheap synthetics is what enables brands to sell body care products for significantly cheaper than face care —this explanation landed perfectly with their audience. A new series called “Hold the Elevator” breaks down common body care myths in easy to digest bite-sized content, helping consumers become more informed about what they’re putting on their body.

They understood that before you can sell premium body care, you have to convince people that their bodies deserve premium care at all. That's not marketing. That's cultural change.

Building a legacy that matters

Four years in, the landscape is shifting. New body care brands are emerging every quarter. Series B face care brands are launching body care lines. Investors are suddenly interested in the category. And Hibiscus Monkey? They're thrilled.

When these new brands talk about bringing focus to "95% of your skin," they're speaking a language Hibiscus Monkey taught the market. When they position body care as worthy of investment and attention, they're validating a belief system Hibiscus Monkey spent four years building, one skeptical customer at a time.

But the founding trio's north star hasn't changed: bringing better products to Indian consumers. While others are just discovering body care, Hibiscus Monkey is already three innovations ahead—more targeted formulations, deeper consumer education, relentless pursuit of what Indian skin truly needs.

Hibiscus Monkey walked so others could run. But they're not standing still watching the race. They're still climbing.