How She Built the Fastest Growing Supplements Brand in India | Shilpa Khanna Thakkar, Chicnutrix

She was crying at her desk. So she asked her own scientists to fix it.

Shilpa Khanna Thakkar had already helped build Fast&Up into one of India’s biggest sports nutrition brands. Then her hair started falling out, no dermatologist could help, and she went to the biotech team down the corridor.

Chicnutrix did not start from a trend deck. It started from a problem Shilpa couldn’t solve for herself. She had seen several dermatologists, been offered PRP and hormonal medication, and didn’t want to go that route. She describes crying at work over how much hair she was losing.

So she put it to her own team: if we can formulate this many nutrition products, why can we not make something for this? A group of biotech PhDs came back within a week, she became the first tester, and the product that eventually emerged as Bounce went out before the brand even had a settled name. Chicnutrix launched properly in 2019 and now runs more than 20 SKUs across skin, hair, PCOS and general wellness.

"Start with a problem women actually have. Build something you would give your own family. Then protect it when the margin pressure arrives."

She learned the business from the engine room

Before any of this, Shilpa built the operational spine of Fast&Up. Accounts, finance, cash flow, MIS, logistics, HR, office setup, parts of marketing. She had young children then, so she deliberately took the work that could be run from an office rather than roles meaning constant travel, and she describes herself as the troubleshooter, the person who walks toward whatever is on fire.

Business development sat with her brother Varun, and they split responsibilities by strength rather than title. Her view is that you cannot build a business alone. It needs co-founders and it needs pillars, and she counts herself lucky to have had both.

The brand is women-first because the problem was

Fast&Up was performance-oriented with a largely male audience. Chicnutrix took shape around a different set of concerns, and not as a demographic exercise bolted on after the formulation. The women-first direction came from the fact that the problem was hers.

What that changed was the question the team started with. Not what looks current, but what would help a woman get through her day with her confidence intact. Shilpa is direct about the emotional weight of it, and the same thinking later shaped the skin products, which also came out of her own experience.

The founder is the first quality gate

Shilpa personally tests many products before they launch, and the standard she applies is whether she would be comfortable giving it to her own family. It sounds like a soft rule. In practice it is the thing that holds when a team is under pressure to cut ingredient cost, lift margin, or ship faster.

That pressure gets stronger as a company scales, not weaker. A cheaper source or less of the expensive ingredient always improves the spreadsheet. Her position is that the product DNA does not move, because the people buying in this category, a lot of them young women, are extending trust that is slow to earn and quick to lose.

Data first, instinct second

Shilpa thinks women founders bring a particular lens into the organisation, and she uses it consciously when deciding on products, marketing and partnerships. But she is clear that empathy does not exempt the business from numbers.

Her sequence is data first, then gut on top. Customer surveys, direct conversations with buyers, sales patterns and testing produce the evidence; instinct reads what the evidence hasn’t explained yet. She is equally clear about competitors: stay alert, don’t get scared, don’t copy and paste.

Word of mouth was the whole media plan

There wasn’t a large budget at the start, so the brand went to beauty influencers, makeup artists and lifestyle creators with a straightforward proposition: try this, and only talk about it if it works for you. The content that worked showed actual use rather than a polished claim, which is a slower way to build reach and a harder one to fake.

The same logic runs through the celebrity partnerships. Chicnutrix picks ambassadors from people who already use the products. Varun Dhawan was using it before he became an ambassador, and later invested. Sreeleela was chosen for product use, relevance to a younger audience, and the fact that she holds an MBBS degree, which Shilpa describes as science meeting glamour.

The order matters more than the fame. Use, then belief, then endorsement. A campaign built that way reads as an extension of something real rather than a rented opinion, which in a category this crowded with claims is most of the battle.

Brighter is not the same as fairer

One of the firmer lines Shilpa draws is between clearer, healthier-looking skin and the promise of becoming fairer. She is explicit that the second is not what the brand is selling, and that the goal is skin health rather than a different skin tone.

It is a commercially inconvenient position in a market that has monetised the opposite for decades, and it points at something broader about category education: sometimes the job is not explaining the ingredient, it is correcting the aspiration attached to it.

Against the instant fix

The wellness market keeps producing interventions that look faster and more dramatic than a daily supplement. Shilpa’s position is cautious. Visible speed is not evidence of suitability, and high-dose interventions are not casual beauty routines. Her analogy is almonds: they are good for you, and two hundred a day is still a bad idea.

That leaves her with a harder marketing problem than her competitors have, because consistency is less exciting than transformation. Her answer is education, at events and expos and through the brand’s own content. Supplements complement food, they do not replace it, and knowing an ingredient’s name tells a buyer almost nothing about whether the formulation in front of them is the right one.

Listen to the full conversation with Shilpa Khanna Thakkar on FyndOutWithRagini.