How a Former Unilever Engineer Built an Ayurveda Beverage Brand Selling 150K Bottles a Month
A chemical engineer left a long Unilever career to make Ayurveda convenient as a coconut-water beverage, and grew Auric to 150,000 bottles a month while staying 95% bootstrapped.
Part of Bootstrapped builders
Business snapshot
Monthly revenue
$300K/mo
reported Sept 2020
- Based in
- New Delhi, Delhi, India
- Monthly bottle sales
- 150,000
- Bootstrapped share
- 95%
- Sales via own website
- 80%
- Sales via Amazon
- 15%
- Social spend to own site
- 80%
- Unit economics
- Unit operation positive
Tools
- Google Analytics
- Microsoft Excel
- Facebook Analytics
- Wix
- Shopify
- Amazon
Founder-reported figures, not independently verified.
Who built it, and what they built
The founder of Auric trained as a chemical engineer and spent nearly a decade at Unilever, mostly in haircare and skincare categories, where they developed a love for consumers and brands. A backbone fracture suffered during a soccer match pushed them toward yoga, and over time they became a wellness enthusiast who began studying and practicing Ayurveda.
Auric, based in New Delhi, India, is a beauty and wellness brand built on Ayurveda. It blends Ayurvedic botanicals into coconut water to create natural, low-calorie drinks. Before COVID, the top seller was a skin radiance drink promising a healthy glow; after COVID, an immunity-focused drink called Body Defence took the lead.
Where the idea came from
The idea grew out of two observations. Professionally, the founder noticed that shoppers chose haircare and skincare products for specific benefits, yet bought food purely for taste and refreshment, which seemed backwards for things that go inside the body. Personally, three years of physiotherapy after the fracture did not help, while five years of yoga left them fitter and changed, sparking a deep interest in Ayurveda.
When the founder tried to get friends to adopt Ayurveda, the common pushback was that it felt too complicated, or that it seemed to require following a sage. That produced the second insight: make Ayurveda convenient and aspirational. After more than 8 years at Unilever, the founder left to start Auric, and credits the company with teaching them to think in terms of brands rather than just products, which helped them move through team, product, and brand in the first 9 months.
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