Nirogam on the Path to Rule The Indian Ayurveda Industry

The global acceptance of traditional practices of herbal and Ayurveda treatments has broadened the prospects of Ayurvedic products in India. The Ayurveda market in India is segmented on the basis of Ayurveda products and services. Personal care products, food and beverages, household and healthcare products fall under the Ayurveda products category.

“The Ayurveda market in India was valued at Rs 300 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach Rs 710.87 billion by 2024, expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.06 percent, during the forecast period (2019-2024),” as per a report by PR Newswire.

In recent years, as a holistic healing system, Ayurveda has witnessed an evolution in the form of Ayurvedic products and services. Rising awareness about the importance of a healthy lifestyle, increasing preference in favor of chemical-free natural products, as well as favorable government initiatives have led to the expansion of the Ayurveda market in India.

Awareness and adoption of Ayurveda have grown enormously since the last 2 years during the Covid pandemic period. Unfortunately, while a number of beauty brands claim that they are offering Ayurvedic products, many of them are just herbal. If you make a cosmetic or beauty/ skin product using herbs, it's herbal. An Ayurvedic product can only be claimed if we have used some Ayurvedic method or process to produce it. Ayurvedic skin and body care products are typically made using oils, churnams, and lepams using natural ingredients.

These days, the beauty industry is claiming serums, creams, gels also as Ayurvedic which is not factually correct. To deny every myth regarding the Ayurveda and its product available in the market, Nirogam took a step ahead. The brand focuses on providing answers to people who don’t know what to buy. The company works as a bridge between traditional books where most of the Ayurvedic wisdom is buried and modern-day consumers who want to adopt Ayurveda but typically find it cumbersome and inaccessible. It focuses on complex, chronic, and unsolved diseases and creates convenient and easy-to-consume products for them.

Elaborating this further, Puneet Aggarwal, Founder, Nirogam shared, “I’ve been a committed Ayurveda activist and a consultant by experience. By pure chance, I got the opportunity to promote an Ayurvedic product from a doctor who was employing my services and I started finding out what a huge gap there was between available remedies and what people knew about them. My team and I have been working relentlessly for the past 20+ years to help people heal, with emphasis on the diet (Ahaar), lifestyle (Vihaar), and natural Ayurvedic medicine (Aushadhi) for corrective action.”

“Today our context of doing business or the compelling 'why?', is that we stand committed to helping people adopt Ayurveda and make it an integral part of their lives by practicing simple, easy, convenient dinacharya and realizing the endless Ayurvedic possibilities to solve health conditions,” he added.

Where most of the Ayurvedic brands struggle a lot through their initial journey in order to grow and streamline their revenues, Nirogam was always on a steady growth trajectory.

“Our revenue has continued to grow from Rs 60 lakh in 2012 to Rs 6 crore in the current fiscal year till Jan 2022. The major drivers for our growth so far have been the D2C sales on our website and the Amazon US marketplace with each contributing 50 percent of revenue. This year after seeing growing demand, we are expanding deeper into the marketplaces in India including Amazon, Flipkart, and others,” he shared.

Retail and Marketing Strategy
Retail and marketing can be tricky to most of the new-age brands in the Indian Ayurvedic segment. When we talk about the Ayurveda-derived brands in India, most of them are using the same old-fashioned strategies to grow and push the revenue. Here, Nirogam follows a different approach and brings something new to the table.

“Our touchpoints with customers right now extend from the e-commerce marketplaces to our website, social channels, webinars, and digital consultations. We aim to harmonize all of them together in the backend so that we can provide an integrated and seamless experience to our customers through whichever touchpoint they interact with us,” Aggarwal asserted. 

Technological Approach
In order to truly build a competitive advantage and provide more personalized solutions to its customers, Nirogam brings the best on the basis of personalized interaction with its consumers.

On the technological front, Aggarwal said, “We realized the need for a strong technology-driven backbone for our operations and a seamless tech-enabled frontend interface for our customers. We have taken the relevant steps to kick start this already by creating our app which will in the near future become a one-stop holistic health and wellness solution based on Ayurveda for our customers. We'll do this by marrying products, services, information into a suite of personalized offerings. This personalization will be driven based on the historical interactions and usage of our services by our customers. We are using technology to enable the discovery and sale of our products. We also use online mediums like Youtube and Quora to educate people about this life science.”

Future and Expansion Goals
Future plans should be very clearly defined and measured to meet a company's broader goals. Objectives should be specific in nature and can be easily defined and kept track of.

“We are further consolidating our Amazon US marketplace channel by onboarding US-based warehousing and logistics providers and we also have plans to go Omnichannel,” he concluded.