Splitsvilla winner and The Traitors 2 contestant Soundous Moufakir did not set out to create just another beauty brand. That gap became the starting point for MoroMaa, the beauty, lifestyle and body care brand she launched in India on June 27, 2026. In its first few months, the brand has already sold out two products and raised ₹ 1.5 crore from Aviral Bhatnagar of AJ VC for a 9 percent equity stake.
The idea for MoroMaa came from something much more personal: missing the Moroccan beauty rituals and ingredients she had grown up with after moving away from Europe and, eventually, to Asia.
“It has 5 percent of argan oil, authentic ones. It’s made out of 3.5 percent of ghassoul clay. It has 2 percent of neroli oil, and then it has brown sugar.
Because i grew up using these ingredients, i did through many channels, many other brands, but the authenticity was never there. Because the idea of creating MoroMaa is to establish and create the M Beauty, which is the Moroccan Beauty, and that’s the white space that actually exists, which nobody is filling, i’m not competing with anyone. So that expertise needs a lot of time and you cannot get it very easily. So that’s what we bring as an IP and as a differentiation from other brands,” she adds.
Soundous, who has an MBA in Finance and a career in entertainment, is now balancing two very different worlds as MoroMaa’s founder and CEO. For Soundous, MoroMaa began with a problem she was personally facing. After moving to Asia, she found it increasingly difficult to get access to the Moroccan ingredients and beauty products she had grown up using. Even when she found them, she was not always convinced about their authenticity. “The idea came when I used to live in France, which is just like one hour far from Morocco. We used to have access to those Moroccan beauty rituals and authentic ingredients, but now that I completely shifted to Asia, which is like another continent very far from North Africa, I didn’t have access to those ingredients. I can tell by the colour, by the smell, if the argan oil is authentic or it’s diluted. And sometimes, even though I used to pay a lot of money to get the right quality, I still didn’t get my hand on the right product,” she tells Hindustan Times in an interview. The idea also gave Soundous a chance to bring together her cultural background and business education. “Then came the idea to also bring my identity, put my MBA in Finance into work, and that’s how the whole MoroMaa was created. You don’t have, and that’s also something that cannot be copied, which is the storytelling of the founder,” she adds. For her, that knowledge is a major part of what the brand brings to the table. “I don’t think anyone is coming from Morocco and has grown up using those ingredients and has been immersed into the Hamam rituals and now is bringing that culture and that identity to India. You need to spend a lot of years and a lot of months and months and months in Morocco to understand what are the right ingredients and not just what are the right ingredients. That expertise of when you see an ingredient, you understand which seed is it, authentic, not authentic. When you look at the argan oil, there are different seeds, there are different ways of pressing it, and one leads to an oil that is actually cosmetic use, and one leads to an oil which is actually for beverage. One of MoroMaa’s products reflects that approach through a mix of traditional Moroccan ingredients.
Her larger plan is to introduce what she calls “M Beauty”, or Moroccan Beauty, to Indian consumers. So this is a very typical specific formulation that acts like a scrub, and at the same time acts like a mask and acts like a moisturiser, and it’s made for all skin types,” Soundous says.
