Forest Essentials: Luxury Ayurveda brand expands presence across GCC

Forest Essentials has reimagined Ayurveda and beauty, putting it on the global map. Tell us about its brand journey and foray into international markets.
Forest Essentials started as a vision to bring Ayurveda and the lifestyle it represents to discerning people who wanted pure and efficacious products for their skin. Our belief has always been that every product must be as enjoyable as it is effective.

Harnessing this belief along with our continued focus on innovative formulas, we use only the purest of ingredients, sensuous scents and textures, which continue to be factors that drive the success of the brand. Our aim is to keep delivering unique, multi-sensory experiences to our clientele. This has positioned us as the most credible Indian Ayurvedic beauty brand.

Our key guiding principle for implementation in any international market is to represent India and stay true to its DNA while ensuring that the local customer is at the heart of all execution. We remain determined to use traditional methods of manufacturing that are comparable to anywhere else in the world.

Our key objective is to enhance appeal for our products that are rooted in the ancient science of Ayurveda, by fostering long-term relationships to communicate the brand’s purity, authenticity and efficacy.

Tell us how the company has successfully married age-old Ayurvedic processes with modern beauty trends.
From raw cane sugar to our steam distilled pure oils, everything is made in the traditionally old-fashioned way, according to Ayurvedic tenets.

All our products are infused with natural and the most authentic ingredients, sourced and plucked in their most potent form at certain hours of the day, to ensure their essence is not lost during the long and painstaking production processes. This way, the herbs add their benefits in the purest form, with appealing textures and scents.

What has contributed to Forest Essentials’ incredible success and popularity in the Indian luxury skincare market and how has the brand’s overseas market share expanded?
Back in the year 2000, when one thought of Ayurveda, the associations that came to mind were often contrasting: “medicinal but not enjoyable”, or “effective but not pleasing”. There was little to no emphasis on the pleasure of use; quality was overshadowed by low-cost production, and chemically propelled ingredients made the process more manageable and economical compared to freshly sourced, seasonal ingredients. There was no market for formulations with pure ingredients using Ayurvedic principles. “We can’t afford to produce these” and “no one will buy these” were statements that we frequently encountered early on in our brand journey.

However, we believed that there was an undeniable market gap, and if a product was pure and had the finest quality ingredients, people would buy it.  For years, we worked with vaids (Ayurvedic doctors) and modern biochemists to curate a wide range of products using fresh herbs, hand-pressed oils, medicinal roots, and precious flowers, prepared according to ancient formulations with exacting standards. The products sold well and soon became bestsellers contrary to popular perception.

The idea was to create an Ayurvedic product that transcended its archaic associations; the intent was to make age-old recipes available to the contemporary consumer in the most pleasurable and sensorial form. The thought was to revolutionise Ayurveda in India. This marked a revolutionary time for the Indian beauty industry, as we created a new segment known as ‘Luxury Ayurveda’, which had never existed earlier.

Tell us how the brand sources its ingredients and how sustainability plays a key role in it.
While sustainability and the ‘clean and green beauty’ movement have gained momentum in recent times, these philosophies have been inherent in the DNA of the brand since its inception, almost 20 years ago. The most fundamental Ayurvedic standard for pure, fresh and natural ingredents is that “if you cannot eat it, do not use it on your skin”.

With a growing awareness of environmental concerns paired with new global standards, sustainability is no longer a philanthropic quest. For us, sustainability is a mindset and an ongoing process instead of a single activity or event. Since the inception of the brand, sustainability has been at the core of everything we do, and we have continuously given thought to the entire product cycle, from the sourcing of natural ingredients from responsible and local farmers to our award-winning green manufacturing facility design ensuring a zero carbon footprint.

Our ingredients are sourced from local, small-scale farmers, traditional artisans and rural co-operatives that are experts in their fields. They use environmentally sound farming practices and have organic farms around Lodsi, our manufacturing base in Uttarakhand.

What are some of Forest Essentials’ bestselling products?
Our Soundarya collection, which is infused with pure 24 karat gold, has been recognised as one of the most effective and iconic collections in the Indian beauty industry. Many of our hero products are cherished by consumers from all over the world. These include the Intensive Hair Repair Masque, Sea Salt Crystal Rose Body Polisher, Advanced Youth Formula with Date and Litchi, along with our selection of massage and after bath oils.

Additionally, we recently introduced a new body care collection – specially for the GCC market – infused with lime, saffron and oudh, which is performing very well.

How has the company leveraged e-commerce to drive its growth and expansion?
Forest Essentials has been extremely adaptive to the surge in e-commerce traffic and demand on our online platforms is continuous. We now ship to more than 100 countries from our global website and our international orders account for 30 per cent of the online business with an extremely high repeat rate.

What are the skincare trends influencing the brand’s new products?
What is wonderful about Ayurveda is that it is a lifestyle, and it presents a collaborative approach to organic beauty that works on three levels – outer perfection, inner beauty and ‘ojas’ (Sanskrit for ‘inner fire’) reflected in lustrous hair, glowing skin and clear shining eyes, radiance and vitality.
The DNA of Forest Essentials really is its purity and authenticity, so if you keep that as a cornerstone as you add to any range, it permeates through and sets you apart. Over the years, our customers have become very dedicated to the brand’s formulations rendering our products as ‘must haves’ on their shelves.

What can we expect from Forest Essentials in the near future?
We recently opened two stores in Dubai (in May) and in Kuwait (in June). We will be opening more stores across the GCC, including Abu Dhabi and Bahrain, in the coming months.

Our personal vision is to see Ayurveda move from an alternative science to a mainstream science. It should not only be based on just texts and folklore but also be given a modern context with global standards and policies.

Most of Forest Essentials’ customers today, across all ages, have one thing in common: they all want to invest in inner and outer beauty and in the long-term sustainability of the environment.

Quality is key and while the packaging might be attractive, they are very result oriented and will only come back if the brand delivers. And that’s what Forest Essentials aims to keep doing.

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