Sisters Shaz Rajashekar and Kiku Chaudhuri spent their school vacations traveling from Memorial in Houston to visit family in the lush Himalayan foothills of West Bengal, India. The two recall idyllic summers where they would indulge in the Ayurvedic practice of hair oiling, a centuries-old tradition, during which their grandmother would firmly massage handmade hair oils into their scalps. Crafting the oil was a practice in and of itself. Their grandmother would pick amla berries, hibiscus flowers, holy basil, and moringa leaves from her garden, mix them with fenugreek seeds, and steep the plants in bhringraj, coconut, or sesame oil. The sisters grew up with a love of these ingredients and rituals, and in 2020, they founded hair care brand Shaz & Kiks to share them with the Western world. Now, the company has become one of the first South Asian beauty lines for sale at Sephora. “Who knows hair care better than South Asian women?” Chaudhuri muses.
After a few years away for jobs in Dubai and New York City, respectively, Rajashekar and Chaudhuri returned to Texas in 2018. In their time away from home, they’d noticed a trend: an increase in Ayurveda-based beauty products and wellness practices in the States and abroad. A Sanskrit term meaning “science of life,” Ayurveda is often regarded as an alternative system of healing in the Western world. The principles involve taking care of your mind, body, and spirit through both preventative and remedial rituals— the idea being that treatment isn’t just limited to medication.
Ayurvedic products are typically homemade, so the sisters were surprised to see these formulas bottled and sold to the masses. Even worse, Rajashekar and Chaudhuri noticed they didn’t find much representation from the South Asian community among the brands that touted the use of Ayurvedic spices and plants. “We really felt like we wanted to create space. And we really wanted to honor the stories, the ingredients, the people that grew these ingredients, and then bring them to life in a new way with new customers,” explains Chaudhuri.
Shaz & Kiks couldn’t have been launched at a better time. The rise in “clean beauty” and consumer interest in ingredient transparency aligned with the tenets of Ayurveda. But both founders understood that innovation would be necessary to make traditional customs feel more familiar to a wide audience. Rajashekar, who now lives in Austin, admits to having disliked those summer hair-oiling experiences, even though she really loved the result. So they got to work formulating and refining their first product, a creamy scalp and hair prewash mask (meant to be massaged into a dry scalp ahead of a regular shampoo), in their own kitchens. With Indian ingredients such as amla, moringa, and neem, the prewash has the benefits of hair oiling, but the formula emulates a process modern consumers would understand. “We decided to take that concept of hair oiling, but make the experience into something that the Western world is a little bit more used to,” Rajashekar says.
Rajashekar and Chaudhuri apply Ayurvedic science to hair care in three ways, creating products focused on increasing blood flow, reducing inflammation, and balancing oil production. “We never say there’s one thing that’s going to solve your hair loss. It’s not going to solve your dry scalp. It is that holistic approach that is so core to Ayurveda,” Chaudhuri says. Across the products, there are over 25 herbs, plant oils, and extracts with properties that, when used differently, extend beyond hair care. Ashwagandha, tamarind, and spearmint, which are in the Balancing Clay Hair Cleanser and the Moringa Anti-Breakage Peptide Serum, are also often used to treat health issues ranging from stress to indigestion. Kokum butter, part of the Nourishing Naram Conditioner formula, is derived from the native Indian kokum tree, and its juice is a common digestif in the hot summers. Turmeric, an ingredient in a new shampoo, has been cultivated and used in South Asia for over four thousand years and is thought to relieve pain from arthritis.
Apart from sourcing the raw ingredients from local farms in India, the rest of Shaz & Kiks’s production takes place entirely in Texas, which the pair feel has contributed to the company’s success. Each product takes roughly twelve months to develop, and involves multiple meetings with their team’s lab and warehouse in Dallas, where Chaudhuri is also based. The beauty entrepreneur community in Texas has been especially supportive, they say. The pair met many members of Texas’s growing product community through an Austin-based product accelerator program and were further connected with other beauty vendors through their packaging broker in the DFW area. Rajashekar recalls learning about the difficulties of overseas production from so many of the two’s “founder friends,” whose labs and manufacturers are based in Europe, making the sisters grateful everything was right in their own “backyard.”
But not everyone is as welcoming. The duo have received occasional xenophobic comments online about the “natural” smell of their products. “Just because we’ve gotten a few ‘this smells like an Indian kitchen,’ we’re not going to ever just go and put a completely different kind of scent that doesn’t make sense with the product,” Rajashekar says.
While Rajashekar and Chaudhuri’s grandmother has since passed away, their mother is the first tester for all of their formulas. The family affair is part of what they love about their jobs. “We just wanted to spend more time as sisters and do something that was really meaningful and impactful for us, which for both of us meant something that was rooted in our heritage and our culture,” explains Chaudhuri. “We saw so many people from all over the world coming and celebrating their roots in different ways in the city of Houston, which subconsciously becomes part of who you are. Decades later, we create something that’s rooted in our heritage as well.”
