Natural Skincare Products From MoKa Beauty Works
In my quest for home-made, eco-friendly and natural skincare products, I came across an article in the New Indian Express Newspaper titled “Homegrown secrets to beauty”. It was an introduction to MoKa Beauty Works, a start-up founded by two talented young women entrepreneurs from Kerala, Monica Alankar and Kavya Sajan Kandampully.
MoKa offers a myriad of hand churned, unisex skin care products made from natural ingredients like clay, charcoal, goat milk, essential oils etc. Their products are totally free from preservatives. MoKa has an outlet at Kowdiar, Trivandrum.
To know more about their initiative and their products, I had contacted Ms. Kavya Sajan, one of the co-founders of MoKa, and had put some questions before her for which she had responded with some interesting answers. In this post, I am sharing the same for all of you to read.
Q: How did you come up with this venture and what was your driving force?
A: We (Monica and Kavya) have always been interested in skin care. When we were pursuing our PGDM at Rajagiri, we used to share these home-made remedies with our hostel mates and it was a huge hit. They loved it. Which is when we decided that these tried and tested natural remedies passed down from our grandmothers and mothers need to be made available to the broader public.
Both of us didn’t wanna get into a corporate job and we always wanted to start our own business. That is how we started our venture in April 2019.
Q: Since when have you started this business and have people accepted your products?
A: April 2019 with a flea market at Cochin. The response we got was amazing. Our customers love our products mainly cause they’re safe and natural and deliver the promise we make.
Q: What were the hurdles/challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
A: Reaching new customers was a problem. It was easy the 1st year, cause we put up stalls at many flea markets and WOM is a major advantage for us. But with the pandemic, flea markets stopped and we had to depend only on online sales. It was difficult initially but we made our online promotion strong and we are proud to say that our online customer base increased considerably over the past 1.5 years
Q: What kind of Eco-friendly packaging do you use and to what extend? We have seen many similar products who claim to be Eco-friendly but at the end, they wrap their product in plastic.
A: Our packaging materials range from glass jars, paper pouches and cardboard boxes. For courier, we collect bubble wrap that has already been used and we use that.
Q: Have your products been certified by any government agency? If yes kindly specify.
A: Our licensing processes are in the final stage. We are reformulating our products after considering customer feedbacks. Hence need the licenses for that.
Q: I checked out some of your product images on your FB account and have to say some of your soaps looked yummy. So would this be safe for children?
A: Thank you so much. We get that a lot! Yes they are. We have a bar for babies and infants (goat milk) and most of our other bars are child friendly. Some of them have exfoliants like poppy seeds in them. Hence we do not recommend those for children.
Q: Are your products targeted for the premium category and/or do you have products that could be affordable to the ordinary people.
A: Even though our products are reasonably priced as compared to our competitors. Our products are more on the luxury side. For e.g. Our bars range from Rs. 199-270 which cannot be afforded by everyone. But we have products like lip balms and scrubs that are affordable.
I am passionate about eco-friendly products and solutions and I feel that such initiatives by young entrepreneurs like Monica and Kavya should be encouraged and promoted. To know more about the product range of Moka Beauty Works, you can visit their FaceBook page. They are also available on Instagram: @mokabeautyworks
