Anurag Kedia, Founder of Pilgrim, on Bringing Global Beauty to India

Anurag Kedia spent over a decade building spas and clinics before Pilgrim. What finally moved him was something small and oddly persistent: Indians asking relatives abroad to bring skincare home in their luggage.

Anurag Kedia and Gagandeep Maker, Founder-Pilgrim

Every so often a business begins not with a grand plan but with a habit somebody cannot stop noticing. For Anurag Kedia, it was the suitcase. Someone is flying home from Seoul or Paris or Sydney, and a friend presses a list into their hands: this serum, that essence, or a cream that simply cannot be found in India, or if it can, costs more than it should. The bottle comes home in checked luggage, rationed until the next traveler returns. For a country this large, with a beautiful inheritance of its own, Kedia found the dependence strange. In time, he found it an opportunity.

He did not arrive in beauty by accident, though he took his time getting there. An engineer by training, from IIT Bombay followed by IIM Ahmedabad, he spent the better part of two decades in wellness and beauty before Pilgrim existed. He was on the founding team of the Four Fountains De-Stress Spa group and the Ayurvedic chain NuAyurveda Clinics and served as a Director at Richfeel, the hair and scalp specialists. It was a long, unglamorous apprenticeship in the one thing every beauty brand claims to understand and few actually do: what a person really wants when they walk through the door hoping to feel better about the face in the mirror.

Beauty and grooming had always been a passion for me, he says. Even while building businesses across wellness and healthcare, I found myself constantly drawn to understanding what consumers wanted and how the industry was evolving. Richfeel sharpened it into something closer to a thesis. It gave me a front-row seat to the science of hair, skin, and beauty and helped me understand the gap between what consumers needed and what was actually available.

That gap is the whole of the Pilgrim story, and he names the moment it came into focus without any ceremony at all. We kept seeing Indians asking friends and relatives traveling abroad to bring back skincare products because they couldn't find those ingredients or formulations here.

What followed was the kind of question that, once asked, is difficult to put down. Why should Indian consumers have to wait for someone flying back from another country to access the latest beauty innovations?

He founded Pilgrim in 2019, with his co-founder Gagandeep Makker, and walked it straight into a market already crowded with names. He is unsentimental about that. The crowd, to his eye, was busy selling the wrong thing. Consumers weren't looking for just another moisturizer or face wash, he says. They were looking for products with globally loved ingredients that had earned a reputation for delivering results. Ingredients that people had heard about while traveling or through international beauty communities but couldn't easily buy in India. Where those ingredients did surface, the price tended to close the door again. The opening he saw was narrow and precise: to bring international beauty innovations to India in formulations that were effective, accessible, and fairly priced.

The name holds the whole idea in a single word. A pilgrim travels toward something, and the brand was imagined as an expedition through the world's beauty rituals, returning with whatever proved worth the trip.We wanted to travel the world, identify the most effective beauty ingredients and rituals from different cultures, and bring them to Indian consumers, he says.

Whether it was Korean skincare innovations, French beauty rituals, or Australian botanical ingredients, our philosophy was simple. If something works exceptionally well anywhere in the world, Indian consumers should have access to it too.

The obvious brand to build, in the current mood, would have been the opposite one: a label leaning entirely on India's own deep beauty heritage. Kedia treads carefully here because he means the respect he offers it. "India itself has an incredibly rich beauty heritage, and we deeply respect that," he says. But we also believe great ideas aren't limited by geography. He runs through the atlas Pilgrim has drawn on, French red vine, Korean white lotus, Spanish squalane, Australian Kakadu plum, and Amazonian patuá as proof that no one country holds the patent on a good formula. Beauty today is global, and consumers deserve access to the very best innovations from everywhere.

The Kakadu plum is the ingredient he reaches for when he wants to show the philosophy working, precisely because it had no right to. An Australian fruit almost nobody in India knew, it arrived with no recognition and no head start, only an unusually high natural vitamin C content.

That turned out to be plenty. Although it wasn't widely known in India initially, its naturally high vitamin C content made it an incredibly effective brightening ingredient, he says. Today, it has become one of our most recognized hero ingredients because consumers experienced real results. Notice the order. The results came first; the fame came after, chasing them.

That sequence is more or less how Kedia thinks the whole conversation with a customer should run, and it sets him against a fair amount of the industry's instinct to promise the moon. Trust is difficult to build and easy to lose, he says. We've always believed that long-term credibility matters far more than short-term marketing. He refuses to pretend skincare is a certainty. We communicate what our products are designed to do based on scientific testing and formulation, while also acknowledging that skincare is personal and results vary from individual to individual. He credits the modern buyer with seeing through anything less. Consumers today are extremely informed. They appreciate transparency and clinically backed claims more than exaggerated claims. Our responsibility is to educate first and market second. Much of that conviction was earned in the most immediate way there is. Pilgrim spent a long time selling straight to its customers before it moved into wider retail, and Kedia treats those years as an education no distribution deal could have bought. Every review, every message, every concern helped us improve our products much faster than traditional retail ever could, he says. Underneath the mechanics of it lay something he keeps returning to. It taught us that consumers aren't simply buying products; they're investing trust. That loop, he says, has shaped nearly every major decision we've made.

Not every decision was a pleasure to make. He is refreshingly plain that the hardest chapter was not a failure but a success arriving faster than the company could hold it. One of our biggest challenges was scaling rapidly while maintaining the same product quality and customer experience that helped us grow initially, he says. There were stretches when want outran the machine built to meet it. There were moments when demand exceeded our expectations, and fulfilling that demand without compromising standards required countless difficult decisions.

What he took from it reads almost like a maxim. Sustainable growth is always more important than fast growth.

He is quietly impatient, too, with a tired assumption about the people he sells to: that the Indian consumer is ruled by price and little else. Years of watching them spend taught him otherwise. Indian consumers are incredibly value-conscious, but value is very different from simply looking for the lowest price, he says. They're willing to invest in products when they trust the formulation, understand the ingredients, and consistently see results. Far from passive, he thinks they have done the industry a favor by refusing to be easy. Today's consumer asks informed questions, compares formulations, and expects transparency. They've pushed the entire industry to become more honest and more innovative. His early faith in that intelligence looked, at the time, like a misstep to plenty of people watching from the outside. The received wisdom held that Indian consumers wanted familiar ingredients and famous faces, and Pilgrim offered neither. We invested in explaining why an ingredient works, where it comes from, and how it benefits the skin or hair, he says. It was the slower road, and it proved the correct one. Over time, we saw consumers embrace that educational approach, and ingredient-led storytelling has become one of the defining characteristics of modern beauty marketing. Which is to say a way of selling beauty that now feels ambient was, not so long ago, a gamble he chose to take.

What he wants to change now is, in keeping with the man, distinctly unflashy. He thinks the industry keeps confusing newness with worth. The industry sometimes treats consumers as if they're only looking for trends. In reality, people are looking for consistency, honesty, and efficacy, he says. We don't believe every launch needs to be revolutionary. He would sooner improve something that already works than manufacture the next viral moment, and he has a tidy test for whether a product has earned its place. We want to build products that consumers finish and repurchase, not simply products they post once on social media.

Pressed to name the single product he would let a stranger judge the whole brand by, he answers at once, and it is the one the Kakadu plum built. I would probably choose our 10% Vitamin C Serum with Australian Kakadu Plum, he says. It represents everything Pilgrim stands for: globally inspired ingredients, science-backed formulation, visible efficacy, and accessibility. It introduces consumers to our philosophy while delivering results they can genuinely experience. For all the talk of ingredients and innovation, the truest thing he says is also the least polished, and it concerns the ordinary texture of the days nobody photographs. The launches and the funding rounds, he suggests, are not what the work actually feels like from the inside. Most days aren't glamorous, he says. They're filled with problem-solving, difficult conversations, learning, and constant decision-making. Entrepreneurship isn't defined by product launches or funding announcements; it's defined by showing up consistently, even when things don't go according to plan. What holds it together, for him, is the slow accumulation of small things done properly. Every small improvement, every satisfied customer, and every lesson contributes to building something that can create lasting value. That sense of purpose makes even the ordinary days meaningful.