Shubhika Jain and the secret behind building RAS Luxury Oils as a successful farm-to-face brand

The founder of the luxury skincare line is determined to build a global brand

Like any 27-year-old, Shubhika Jain sounds pretty chill after returning from a short break in Goa. Waiting to board her flight back to Raipur, where her home base is, Jain talks to The Established about what it takes to get an Indian skincare brand off the ground, keeping the momentum running and her plans for the future.

Jain is the founder and CEO of beauty and personal care start-up Ras Beauty Pvt. Ltd, whose brand name RAS Luxury Oils is familiar to most skincare enthusiasts on Instagram. In May 2022, RAS Luxury Oils raised $2 million (₹15 crore) in a pre-series A round of funding from Sixth Sense Ventures. At the time, Jain said, “We plan to transform the global beauty and skincare market as a Made-in-India brand that speaks to a discerning global consumer.” It’s a statement that implies serious business for Jain, who works with her younger sister Suramya Jain and mother Sangeeta Jain at the beauty start-up. The funding for Ras is significant, as the start-up ecosystem globally is experiencing a winter of sorts at the moment.

The Jains founded RAS in 2017 offering beauty and skincare products comprising natural ingredients and potent scientific formulations, manufactured at the start-up’s proprietary vertically-integrated research facility and farms in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. The company has said it has witnessed 20x growth in the last two years, and is aiming to further disrupt the global clean beauty and skincare market, which is expected to reach $54 billion by 2027. They plan to use the fresh capital to deepen inroads into the Indian as well as overseas luxury skincare markets, while accelerating their product range. Edited excerpts from an interview with Jain trace the brand’s trajectory and her plans for the future.

Tell us about your life in Raipur.

My great-grandfather migrated from Rajasthan to Raipur many years ago. This is home base for me, although I have also schooled in Bengaluru and then later studied at Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi. I've always been very ambitious, starting with academics and my sports medals [for karate, taekwondo and horse riding]. Whatever I’ve wanted to do, I’ve tried to do it in a very good way.

What’s the genesis of the brand RAS Luxury Oils

I always wanted to get into business. I've seen my family, generation after generation, do [well] in business through hard work. My grandparents first set up rice mills and later, solid extraction units in Chhattisgarh. My father ventured into education by establishing colleges and schools beside running his own agri-biotech venture. When I joined the business, I was looking at a small part of the business, still learning things. I wanted to improve the [existing] business’s profitability. Although I did land a job at a management consultancy, I wanted to work at the family business. The plan was to first try and eliminate the middlemen who were eating up our margins. We also wanted to use the purest of natural ingredients but in a way that wouldn’t make our products expensive and out of reach.

A litre of rose oil costs ₹12 to 14 lakh; there’s no way that other manufacturers who claim to be using rose oil are actually using it. We learnt about the lack of transparency in India when we tested certain luxury products in the market. So the idea was to launch a brand that was clean, honest, pure and transparent.

Explain to us how you are a farm-to-face brand.

What is of key importance is that the ingredients have to be good. When we say farm-to-face, we actually grow around 20-25 ingredients on our farm. We have a research and development lab, and ingredients are deeply researched. How can we use the extract in the way that you get optimal results? The ingredients need to be processed in a way that they don’t irritate the skin. We didn't want to be a cookie-cutter [company] but wanted to create a line that’s unique, effective and very fresh.

Did you ever imagine that you would be here when you launched?

I started working on RAS six-and-a-half years ago. I knew that I wanted to do it in the best possible way. I did not imagine that it would be an e-commerce brand though, even then I knew that we had to be the best. We started RAS by supplying [our products] to five-star hotels as well as consumer markets. In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we took the decision to focus our sales in the online space.

How do you track consumer satisfaction?

We have a very simple system. We use Google sheets to monitor rather than a very complicated CRM system. We keep track of all the customer issues very steadily in this manner.

Could you explain how you arrived at your pricing?

We use 100 per cent plant-based ingredients, which include preservatives that are plant-based. The cost of manufacturing a natural product is very high because of the exclusivity of such ingredients. When we worked on the pricing, the [usual] questions we asked were: What are our costs? What will be the margins that we have to give to discounts? What would be the fixed cost? Eventually we came to the decision to retain 10 per cent [of revenue] as profits and the rest to be ploughed back into the business. Since we control every bit of the manufacturing and distribution, we manage costs and pass on the benefit to the consumer.

Any plans to expand out of Raipur?

We have just set up an office in Mumbai, about three-four days ago (laughs). That’s where our social media, marketing and PR, and design teams will operate from.

Is RAS an all-woman company?

We are one of the very few companies in the start-up space that does not have a male co-founder; we're three women founders. Hiring only women wasn’t a conscious decision at first. But we soon realised that hiring women also translates into more responsive employees, and it feels good to be paying women as equally as men, they value it much more too.

What led you to the funding conversation?

When you have capital, you can do so much more. Now we are hiring people whom we couldn’t afford earlier, we can now have more inventory, we can experiment more with different styles of marketing. However, we understood that once you start growing at a very fast pace, there is a time where the company does not make profits. At the same, capital is needed to grow faster. You need to invest that money in people, in inventory, in product development and research, all of which requires money. I’d like to take it from a scale of, say one to 10, then 1,000, then 5000, and more until we reach the IPO stage.

Tell us about your marketing and branding strategy.

We wanted to be practical about new-age luxury. The luxury would be in the kind of experience you get, right from ordering the product to receiving it, to using the product, and the effect it will have. So purity is part of the luxury experience. It’s an area that’s handled entirely by my younger sister, Suramya. Even the influencers we tie up with have the similar sort of values as our brand: transparent, ethical, pure, good vibes.

What’s the hottest selling product you have?

Our face oils, especially the Radiance one, our lip tints, the glow potion.There are many!

How is it working with family?

Great! It cannot get better than this. If your ego doesn’t interfere whilst working with family, then it can be successful.

Tell us about future plans?

We will soon be launching a more affordable line of products aimed at the 18-25 age group. It won’t, however, be 100 per cent natural because doing so would really increase costs. The line would be priced in the range that will make it affordable to more people. We will ensure through our manufacturing process that it will be a quality range of products, since we will be manufacturing it ourselves. Also, we’ve gone global by selling on online platforms like Amazon.

Do you ever plan to open brick-and-mortar outlets of your own?

We do, only because you do not get the feel of luxury without a story. To start off, we are thinking of small, very well-made kiosks that will draw in the consumer. This will probably happen in 2023.

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