Health Update: Building a Preventive Wellness Brand for Women’s Health – What Experts Say

India’s wellness economy is undergoing a structural shift, with consumers moving from symptom-based purchases to preventive, routine-driven health solutions. Within this transformation, women’s wellness remains one of the most under-structured yet high-potential segments.

Girlyveda, an emerging MSME-led wellness brand, is attempting to formalise menstrual and hormonal health into a repeat-consumption, preventive category. In this exclusive conversation with SMEStreet, the founding team shares insights into the business opportunity, channel strategy, MSME-level operational realities, and their vision for building a category-defining brand in the coming years.

Identifying the Business Gap in Women’s Wellness

According to the Girlyveda team, the women’s wellness market has historically been dominated by products rather than structured solutions. Large FMCG and hygiene brands focus on sanitary care, while pharmaceutical companies concentrate on symptom-driven medication.

What was missing, they observed, was a preventive wellness business model addressing menstrual and hormonal health as a recurring need.

From a business perspective, this created a fragmented yet under-optimised market. Women were already spending on various solutions, but not within a coherent wellness category. Girlyveda was designed to formalise this demand into a repeat-consumption segment, treating cycle health as a routine aspect of wellness rather than a problem to address only during discomfort.

Scaling Through Sustainability, Not Vanity Metrics

Instead of chasing rapid expansion, the company focused on building sustainable traction. Early customer behaviour indicated that once consumers trusted the product and the brand’s intent, they tended to stay.

Over time, repeat purchases began contributing a significant share of demand, strengthening customer lifetime value and retention cycles—critical indicators for a wellness-focused MSME.

The team emphasises that for small businesses, depth of demand and customer loyalty often matter more than fast but unstable growth.

Balancing D2C and Offline Retail

Girlyveda’s early journey was driven by a direct-to-consumer (D2C) model, which allowed the company to test demand, understand consumer behaviour, and refine its communication without heavy capital investment.

However, as the brand matured, offline retail became essential for scale and credibility—particularly in the Indian market, where physical availability influences trust and purchase decisions.

Today, the brand operates with a balanced channel mix:

This dual-channel approach helps manage acquisition costs while ensuring accessibility across diverse markets.

Competing with Large FMCG Players as an MSME

The Girlyveda team believes that large brands compete on breadth, while MSMEs succeed through focus and agility.

Rather than competing with FMCG giants on advertising or discounting, the company concentrated on solving one category deeply. Its competitive advantage comes from:

• Category focus
  

• Consumer trust
  

• Operational agility

In wellness, they note, trust compounds over time and becomes a competitive moat that is difficult to replicate through scale alone.

Retailer Confidence and Repeat Consumption

Retailers ultimately make decisions based on product movement and repeat demand.

While brand story may help with initial entry, long-term shelf space depends on consistent sales performance. Girlyveda’s positioning in a repeat-consumption category helps retailers see predictable reorders, stable margins, and low return rates.

This reduces retailer risk and builds long-term confidence in the brand.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 Markets as Core Growth Engines

For Girlyveda, smaller cities are not secondary markets—they are core growth centres.

These regions demonstrate:

• Strong cultural familiarity with Ayurveda
  

• Growing willingness to invest in wellness
  

• Higher loyalty and repeat purchase rates once trust is established

However, these markets also demand tighter cost control, smaller pack sizes, and efficient distribution models.

Key Financial and Operational Challenges

Like many MSMEs, Girlyveda faced early challenges around:

To address these, the company adopted a lean operating model, limited unnecessary SKUs, and scaled distribution gradually.

This capital-efficient approach may slow short-term growth, but it builds long-term resilience—an essential factor for sustainable MSME success.

The Five-Year Vision: Building a Category-Defining Brand

Looking ahead, the company’s definition of success is not just scale, but sustainable and credible growth.

Over the next five years, Girlyveda aims to:

• Operate as a profitable, scalable wellness company
  

• Build strong presence across offline and online retail
  

• Create predictable, repeat-driven demand cycles
  

Ultimately, the goal is to emerge as a category-defining brand that consumers trust, retailers rely on, and the ecosystem recognises as a successful MSME-led wellness story.