Mamaearth Brand Guidelines: A 2016 Gurugram Baby-Care Start and the Honasa House of Brands

Two founders, six products and a website.

Mamaearth was started in 2016 by the husband-and-wife founders Varun Alagh and Ghazal Alagh. Its parent company, Honasa Consumer, says on its website that the venture began that year, when the couple were new parents looking for products for their first child, and that Mamaearth began as a brand for baby care. Inc42, writing about the business in August 2020, described it as Gurugram-based and said it had started with just six products, sold through its own website and through marketplaces including Amazon and Flipkart.

The brand and the company carry different names. Mamaearth is the consumer brand on the pack; Honasa Consumer is the company the Alaghs set up to run it, Inc42 reported. Varun Alagh is co-founder and chief executive of Honasa Consumer, Entrackr reported in December 2025, when it also described the group as Gurugram-based.

From the start, Mamaearth did not run its own factories. In 2020 Varun Alagh told Inc42 that one of the hardest early tasks had been finding manufacturing partners willing to work with the ingredient list the company had set, and that after a round of meetings with vendors across India it settled on partners that already supplied export markets. When Honasa listed in 2023, TechCrunch reported that the business relies on third-party manufacturing and holds no manufacturing intellectual property of its own.

The range soon moved beyond babies. By August 2020, Inc42 reported, Mamaearth had more than 100 products and had added about a dozen that year alone. Beyond its website and the marketplaces it had moved into large-format chains such as Shoppers Stop and Central and into standalone shops, around 2,000 stores in all, although Varun Alagh said most of the business still came through the company’s own website. The same report noted a campaign of that period called “Goodness Inside.” Today the Mamaearth website groups its products into skin care, hair care, body care and baby care ranges.

A house of brands, listed in 2023.

Honasa Consumer became a listed company in November 2023. Its shares began trading on 7 November 2023, TechCrunch reported, describing Mamaearth as a seven-year-old company and the listing as one watched closely by other Indian start-ups weighing their own public offerings. Investors named in that report included Peak XV Partners, Fireside Ventures, Stellaris Venture Partners and Sofina.

By then Mamaearth was no longer a single brand. At the time of the listing, TechCrunch reported, Honasa operated six: Mamaearth, The Derma Co, Aqualogica and Ayuga, which it had built itself, and BBlunt and Dr Sheth’s, which it had acquired. Its products reached shoppers online, through its own sites and through e-commerce marketplaces, and offline through more than 154,000 retail points, a mix of traditional and modern trade outlets, exclusive stores and BBlunt salons, the report said.

The portfolio has kept changing. In December 2025, Entrackr reported from a stock-exchange filing that Honasa had picked up a 95% stake in BTM Ventures, the owner of the men’s grooming brand Reginald Men. That brand had launched in August 2022, concentrated on sunscreens and serums and drew most of its business from South India, the report said, and the deal gave Honasa a formal entry into men’s grooming. In the quarter to September 2025, according to the same report, Honasa had also taken a 25% stake in Couch Commerce, the company behind the Fang Oral Care brand.

Honasa’s own website now lists Mamaearth, The Derma Co., Aqualogica, Lumineve and Staze as brands it built, and BBlunt, Dr Sheth’s and Reginald Men as brands it acquired. It describes the group as a digital-first house of brands aimed at millennial shoppers, with each brand presented under its own name.

Design and documentation.

India’s beauty and personal-care brands range from names that began inside old industrial groups to labels that started on their own websites. Lakmé was incorporated in December 1952 as a Tata company, according to Trent, the retailer that the original company became, and its brands passed to Hindustan Lever, now Hindustan Unilever, in 1998, Business Today reported. Dabur says on its corporate site that it started operations in Calcutta in 1884.

Some newer brands describe themselves as digital-first. Honasa Consumer, the owner of Mamaearth, calls itself a “digital-first house of brands” on its corporate website, and says Mamaearth began in 2016. Sugar Cosmetics sold only through its own website and a marketplace partner until 2017, Inc42 reported in 2020, before moving into general trade, large-format stores in malls and its own shops.

Shops and counters remain part of the picture. Sugar’s chief executive told the trade magazine Retail4Growth in 2023 that the brand used exclusive outlets, shop-in-shop counters and multi-brand stores, and that it changes its visual merchandising every year. Lakmé has tied its name to a runway since 2000, when the Fashion Design Council of India and IMG brought it in as title sponsor of a new fashion week, The Tribune reported in 2025.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: when and where it began, who founded and owns it, which named product lines and campaigns it publishes, and how it presents itself in packs, logos and stores. Where a fact rests only on a company’s own pages, the text says so, and the palettes and typefaces shown are an unofficial interpretation rather than any brand’s own.

A brand on the shelf, a mark for the group.

Mamaearth’s campaigns have been made with outside agencies. In July 2023 Social Samosa reported that Mamaearth had named Havas Worldwide India, the creative arm of Havas India, as its agency on record after a multi-agency pitch, with a mandate covering above-the-line, below-the-line and digital work. Honasa’s chief marketing officer said at the time that the brand had been built over six years on millennial beliefs and choices.

The parent company changed its own look the following month. In August 2023, Storyboard18 reported, Honasa Consumer introduced a refreshed corporate identity built from three elements: a female figure, a tree of life and a spectrum of multicoloured circles. In the company’s explanation, as the report gave it, the female silhouette is a nod to the Mamaearth brand and the idea of a mother; the tree stands for progress, balance and prosperity; and the circles stand for the variety of brands in the portfolio. The report did not name a design agency.

That leaves two layers of identity to keep apart. The Honasa mark belongs to the listed group, while Mamaearth, The Derma Co. and the other brands each appear under their own names on the group’s website and on their own sites. A design study of Mamaearth is therefore a study of a consumer brand that sits inside a larger corporate system rather than of the company itself.

For a design guide, Mamaearth shows how a direct-to-consumer brand founded in 2016 became, within seven years, the flagship of a listed house of brands with its own corporate symbol. Compare Plum, another Indian beauty brand that began online, and L’Oréal, a group that also runs many brands under one parent. For this guide we use a leaf green, a warm cream and a soft sky blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mamaearth’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.