Motherhood narrowed my time and broadened my filter at the same time. Every decision now passes through one quiet check: does this serve what I am actually building, or just how it looks on paper? It is a simple test, and it changes a lot. As a founder, it has made me precise. I take on what I can truly deliver, not what sounds good in a meeting. I have turned down many deals because the bandwidth wasn't there, and I am at peace with that. I have become slower to compromise on ingredients, on quality, on the people I let into the company. Not because of my children, but because of who I have become through them.
As a person, it has made me softer in places I didn't expect. I have learned to break every goal into the smallest possible parts and show up for each one, instead of chasing the whole. My children have grown alongside the work, they come to exhibitions, my staff come to their birthdays, and the two lives have stopped feeling separate. Being a single mother only sharpens all of this. There is no second adult to absorb the trade-offs. So I have learned to make fewer, cleaner decisions, and to let go of the rest.
There wasn't one moment. There were two children. My daughter Arshiya, who's ten now, has been drawn to anything trendy and Pinterest-pretty since she could hold a phone. I have spent over a decade reading ingredient labels for a living, and I couldn't unsee what was inside most of those products. So I quietly started making her age-appropriate versions in my own lab. Eventually, Arshiya stopped just receiving them and started shaping them. She has the eye for packaging and for what kids actually want to pick up, while I brought the science.
My son Divank is six. He has had eczema almost since birth. The doctor recommended coconut oil, multiple times a day, but as a working mother I would skip applications, and even when I didn't, the hydration wasn't deep enough. One day I brought home a plain body lotion from our factory, not a special formulation, just an existing Vive product I picked up for the whole family. No added fragrance. No colour. Just a clean, simple base. In ten days, his eczema was gone.
That was the real moment for me. The answer hadn't been complicated. It simply did not exist in the form parents were being sold. Two children, two completely different needs, both failed by what the market was offering. That is when I stopped formulating quietly and started building Clariteens .
A decade in B2B teaches you a particular thing. We have manufactured for over 600 brands at Vive Cosmetics, which means I have watched every kind of brand get built, the careful ones and the careless ones. You see who fights for an ingredient swap and who waves it through.
For most of those years, I was happy on the manufacturing side. I wasn't looking to start a consumer brand. What changed was a gap I kept noticing. The market was offering two extremes: products too mild to do anything useful, or adult formulations shrunk into smaller, prettier bottles. Almost nothing was built specifically for skin that is still developing. With the knowledge already in my head and the resources already inside our facility, I knew I could close that gap. So Clariteens became my project, every formulation, every active, every piece of packaging done end-to-end by us. Easier said than done. I have improved, and re-improved, these formulas more times than I can count, because I refused to settle anywhere along the way.
The harder battle has not been the science. It is awareness, and the quiet stigma that children's skincare is somehow an unnecessary beauty push. It is not. It is preventive health, in the same category as nutrition, sleep, and brushing teeth. The earlier we get this right for our children, the less they will have to undo as adults. That is what made me cross over from manufacturing to building.
Three gaps, mostly. The first is positioning. Most "kids' skincare" is either repurposed baby product, which stops being relevant by age six or seven, or repackaged adult product made smaller and pinker. Very little is built honestly for the years in between, when skin is changing fastest. And almost nothing is built for the Indian skin and climate: humid, hot, polluted, sweat-prone.
The second is ingredient honesty. "Natural" and "herbal" are not automatically safe, and "synthetic" is not automatically harmful. Putting a herb into a formula is not science. Without clinical proof at the right concentration, it is label decoration, whether it sits at 0.1% or at 10%. The real answer is in between: ingredients that are nature-derived, then scientifically studied, tested, and refined for the skin and the age they are made for.
The third, and the hardest, is awareness and the urgency of now. Our parents did not need any of this. They used one plain cream for the whole family, and that was enough. Our children are growing up in a fundamentally different world, with more UV, more pollution, more screen time, more sweat, and more humidity. Yet most parents still come to skincare reactively, when there is already a visible problem. By then, a lot of the damage is harder to reverse naturally.
A quieter test runs underneath all three: texture. If a sunscreen stings a child's eyes or a moisturiser feels heavy in Indian humidity, no parent will win that daily battle. Children should want to use what we make. That has shaped every single formulation we have put out. These are the gaps Clariteens exists to close.
In every line of every formulation. We started with a question only a parent really asks: would I put this on my own child, every day, for years? If the answer was anything less than a clean yes, the ingredient didn't make it in.
That filter shaped the whole brand. Functional actives, but never harsh. Age-appropriate concentrations. A focus on strengthening the microbiome and skin barrier rather than stripping it. No fragrance for the sake of fragrance. No colour just so the bottle looks pretty on a shelf. And textures light enough for Indian humidity, gentle enough that no child runs away from a stinging eye or a heavy face. The values came from the same place: preventive, not corrective. Transparent over flashy. Calm over loud. Children don't need miracles. They need consistency, and ingredients that respect what their skin is still learning to do. That, in the end, is what I would have wanted as a mother. So that is what we built.
The hardest parts are invisible to most people: the constant, quiet trade-offs no one sees. A meeting that runs late on the day a child has a fever. A factory issue that surfaces during a school event. The moment you realise neither role can pause for the other, and you have to decide, in real time, where you are most needed.
There is also the loneliness of decision-making. As a single mother, there is no second adult to think it through with at 11 PM. You learn to trust your own judgement faster than most founders do, partly because you have no choice.
And then there is the guilt of both, never feeling fully present in either room. I have made my peace with that, mostly. Some days less than others. What has carried me through all of it is my own mother. She has been the quiet anchor, picking up the school day when a meeting runs over, holding my children when I can't, and reminding me, in her own way, that I am still allowed to be someone's daughter while I am running three companies. I would not be sitting where I am without her.
So while the world calls me a "single mother entrepreneur," the truth is I have never been single-handed. I have just had a different kind of partner, one generation up.
The mother. Always.
The entrepreneur in me is ambitious, structured, sometimes impatient. She is useful, but she is tired by Wednesday.
The mother in me is quieter and far more stubborn. She is the one who reminds me why I started, not for a market opportunity, but because two specific children needed something the world wasn't giving them. And if I am building this for them, I can't quit on a Tuesday. There was a time, especially with my daughter, when there were complaints, long days, late evenings, a tired mother coming home after the children had already gone to sleep. Today, when she tells me she is proud of me, I know she has watched the work and understood it. That carries more than any milestone ever has. On the hardest days, I don't think about revenue, or scale, or what comes next. I think about Arshiya and Divank, and the woman I want them to remember. That is enough.
For me, motherhood isn't a role I perform on Mother's Day. It is the lens I see everything through, every product, every decision, every quiet hour after my children are asleep.
Beyond the usual definitions, being a mother has meant becoming someone my children can rely on without asking. Someone who shows up, calmly, consistently, even when the day hasn't been kind. It has meant raising two human beings while building something that, I hope, will outlast me in some small way.
Most of all, it has meant learning that I don't have to be perfect. I just have to be present, honest, and willing to do the next right thing.
That, I think, is what we are quietly teaching them too.
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