Sandhya Sakuja brings a new trend in Indian skin care

A veteran in the Indian skin-care and retail sector, Sandhya Sakuja is currently the Director of Vedic Cosmeceuticals, a contract manufacturer of high-quality personal care products. In an exclusive conversation with Hans India, Sandhya speaks about her brand and her journey Vedic Cosmeceuticals. Let's have a look into it.

Tell us about your company and your journey in this male dominating sector.

Breaking the glass ceiling is a big challenge even in the modern professional world and many women, despite their caliber, ambition and mettle, face numerous challenges in their path towards leadership status. My journey has also been full of challenges, ups and downs, ebbs and flows. From convincing clients, investors to all important stakeholders, I had to demonstrate my grit and patience at every step. Though the journey has not been easy, but I kept on consistently working towards my dreams and goals and with time, everybody joined my bandwagon of dreams.

Today, Vedic Cosmeceuticals is one of India's leading contract manufacturers of high-quality personal care products in the skincare, haircare, baby care, and intimate care categories.

We have worked persistently towards making Vedic an end-to-end service provider, from the idea to conceptualization to making and packaging of the products. We have reached out to 50 + Indian and international brands.

I have put my 20 years of industry experience into research, development and manufacturing of products at Vedic. The company has a highly skilled R&D team which is capable of producing multiple skincare and wellness products, catering to today's consumer needs. We also thoroughly follow sustainability and our products are environment friendly.

Some leading companies in India are already in the retail sector. How difficult is it for your enterprise to make a mark in this business?

We are not in the D2C segment, our products are manufactured for retail skincare and wellness companies. In fact, a lot of products for leading Indian as well as international skincare companies are formulated & manufactured by Vedic Cosmeceuticals.

Over the years, our innovation, agility, and service consistency have helped us stand out in the industry. Our constant focus on innovation, clean beauty, and strong R&D have helped in building credibility across our entire supply value chain. We ensure quality in our products and our turnaround time is highly optimal. At a macro level, our idea-to-shelf model has facilitated and accelerated go-to-market for our clients, and that's why most of them have continued staying with us, since the beginning of our association.

Any success mantra you want to share with working mothers?

I am a mother to a 17 year old daughter. Balancing can be tough sometimes, but largely I practice discipline on my time invested in various aspects of life, which helps me play my role as a mom.

While weekdays do allow for limited time, I ensure on weekends, I engage with my daughter and we spend quality time, we also discuss about planning her career moves ahead.

My success mantra for working mothers Is to be disciplined, do some exercise and be conscious about diet. Staying healthy and fit is most important for self. It is only then that one can have the energy to juggle well and keep going smiling all the way.

It would be interesting if you could share what your research has brought forth in the Indian beauty market.

Vedic Cosmeceuticals' R&D team is very strong and skilled to create products for today's cosmopolitan user profile.

We are equipped with a state of the art cosmeceuticals laboratory that is capable of churning out the best products from stable formulations, and our 1000+ formula bank is instrumental here to ensure quick turnaround times in keeping with the pace demanded by our clients.

Our R&D team focuses on the latest innovations, trends and textures going by specific requirements of brand and consumer preferences and keeping in mind the climatic conditions and various consumer groups. While we have an aggressive focus on clean beauty, we are also extremely agile and adaptable to the changing needs of our client brands. We are quality conscious but price conscious as well, so as to enable our client brands to hit the bottom of the pyramid.

With the pace that Vedic is going, we will surely become the market leader in Innovation based Private Label manufacturing very shortly.

As part of Corporate Social Responsibility, what's Vedic doing for cruelty-free products?

As mentioned above, we ensure ethical practices and compliances at our plant. Keeping in line with regulations of 'no child labor" and "against cruelty" our endeavor is to keep working on improving our practices for a better society.