Why I Left a Career to Build a Skincare Brand Rooted in Ayurveda

People ask me when I decided to start Inherited Skincare. I usually say it was a gradual realisation — but if I'm honest, there was a specific afternoon. I was sitting at my desk in an open-plan office, halfway through a career that looked successful from the outside, and I thought: I am not building anything that matters to me.

That sounds dramatic. It wasn't, really. It was just quiet. A small, persistent knowing that I'd been ignoring for a long time.

The Itch I Couldn't Ignore

For years, I had been going home from work, washing my face, and using a handful of products that were fine — effective enough, inoffensive — but felt entirely disconnected from who I was. I had grown up watching my grandmother Leela tend to her skin with ingredients from her kitchen: washed ghee, turmeric, rose water. I had my mother's voice in my head every time I picked up something with a list of thirty unpronounceable ingredients. What is actually in this?

The gap between what I wanted and what existed was the business. I just didn't frame it that way at first.

The Courage Part

I won't pretend leaving a stable career to build a brand from scratch was an easy decision. It wasn't. There were conversations with myself at 2am that I wouldn't want to repeat. There was the entirely reasonable fear of failure, and the less reasonable (but equally real) fear of what people would think.

What got me through it, genuinely, was the clarity of the purpose. I wasn't trying to disrupt an industry or build a unicorn. I was trying to make sure that a very specific kind of knowledge — about how to nourish skin gently, using ingredients with deep roots and modern safety credentials — was available to people who needed it. People like the version of me who moved to the UK and spent two winters trying to find a moisturiser that actually helped.

What Inherited Skincare Stands For

Every product we make is built around a small number of ingredients I can explain in plain English. Every formula is CPSR-tested and made here in the UK. We are cruelty-free and proud of it. Nothing about our approach is accidental — I spent years learning how to take something that belonged in a grandmother's kitchen and make it suitable, and safe, and genuinely effective for skin that lives in the British climate.

I left a career to build something I believed in. That's the whole story, really. Everything else is just the work.

Where We Are Now

There are days when I open an email from a customer who says a product changed how their skin feels after years of struggling, and I think about that afternoon at my desk. It was the right call. It was always going to be the right call. I just needed to get quiet enough to hear it.