Astha Jain, Co-founder of imfresh, who appeared on Shark Tank India Season 5 with the brand, believes this shift reflects a genuine gap in the market. The Indian personal-care market is moving beyond fragrance-led products, with consumers increasingly looking for solutions that address everyday hygiene concerns. Whole-body deodorants are emerging as one such category, especially among younger consumers who are more conscious about ingredients, product formats and long-lasting efficacy. From changing consumer habits and the rise of quick commerce to ingredient-conscious buying, Jain shares what is driving the evolution of India’s deodorant and personal-care landscape.
Her career reflects consistent growth, moving from content contributor to senior writer. She now plays a key role in shaping editorial strategy, social media content, and ensuring high-quality, reader-focused content that aligns with evolving audience needs. Shweta’s core expertise spans makeup, skincare, hair care, and holistic health and fitness. She specialises in in-depth beauty product reviews, ingredient analysis, skincare routines, and evidence-based wellness advice. Known for her analytical and data-driven approach, she relies on verified sources, dermatological insights, and expert consultations to ensure credibility. Her field experience includes interviewing Bollywood celebrities, beauty and makeup professionals, tracking consumer trends, and simplifying the top picks. Shweta holds a Master’s degree in Mass Communication, Advertising, and Journalism and has done Bachelor’s in Commerce from Delhi University. She believes in delivering reader-first insights that empower informed decisions while maintaining transparency, credibility, and trust. Beyond her writing desk, Shweta enjoys exploring new destinations, experimenting in the kitchen with delightful recipes, and staying in tune with the latest beauty and wellness trends. For years, deodorants have largely focused on one area of the body. However, consumers are increasingly looking for products that address body odour more comprehensively. Q: What inspired you to launch imfresh, and what consumer gap did you notice in the personal-care market? Astha Jain: Years of building consumer brands taught me to pay close attention to what customers complain about when they think nobody’s listening. And in personal care, the same complaint kept surfacing: deodorant only solves for underarms, but body odour doesn’t stop at the underarms. The Indian deodorant market has been stuck in the same format for decades – alcohol-heavy sprays, built around a single application area, sold on fragrance rather than function. For a country with this climate, that’s a strange gap. Consumers were improvising, using talc, layering fragrance, reapplying through the day. Nobody had built a product for the actual problem. Gen-Z made the gap impossible to ignore. This is a generation that reads ingredient lists, questions what alcohol and aluminium do to their skin, and expects a product to work for a full day rather than an hour. A cream format rather than a spray, formulated for use anywhere on the body, designed for long-lasting freshness in Indian conditions. The response validated the thesis. The conviction behind Imfresh is simple: identify a genuine unmet need, build honestly for it, and trust that customers can tell the difference. What made you believe that whole-body deodorant creams could become a mainstream category in India? Astha Jain: Three things convinced me. The first was climate. For most of the year, across most of the country, people are dealing with heat and humidity that a single-area product simply wasn’t designed for. When customers are improvising a workaround at that scale, the category gap isn’t theoretical. The second was format. A cream sits on skin , goes wherever you need it, and lasts. That’s not a marginal improvement; it’s a different product answering a different question. The third was the consumer. Gen-Z buys differently. They read ingredient lists, they ask what alcohol and aluminium salts are doing to their skin, and they’re willing to switch away from brands their parents used if something works better. Q: What was the biggest challenge you faced while educating consumers about a relatively new product format? Astha Jain: Convincing people they had a problem in the first place. Ask someone about deodorant , and they picture a spray and an underarm. That’s the whole category in their head. So when we showed up with a full-body cream, the reaction wasn’t doubt about quality; it was confusion about what we were even for. People had been reapplying through the day and using talc for years, and had stopped seeing that as a problem worth fixing.
Shweta Pandey is a Senior Content Writer at Hindustan Times, with over 12 years of experience in beauty and wellness journalism, specialising in makeup, skincare, and hair care. She began her professional writing journey in 2011, entering the evolving world of digital lifestyle journalism as beauty and wellness content rapidly transformed in India. So in 2024 we launched Imfresh – India’s first full-body deodorant cream.
Because it proves the demand was real and not bought with discounting, we now serve over 2 lakh customers and process 13,000 orders a month, and we’ve stayed profitable throughout as a bootstrapped company – which matters,. Because the existing format wasn’t finishing the job, the behaviour was already there – people were reapplying through the day, layering products,.
During an interaction with HT Shop Now, Jain says the idea behind Imfresh came from noticing this gap in the market and seeing how consumers were already creating their own solutions. Over the years, she has worked with reputed digital media houses like India Today, the Times of India and Skymet Weather, steadily building credibility through well-researched features, product reviews, and trend analyses.
We learned we had to name the gap before naming the product. Once someone recognises their own routine in what you’re describing, the format explains itself. The other hurdle was habit. A cream asks you to change how you apply, not just what you buy, and that’s a harder ask than it sounds. Sprays are fast and familiar. That argument only really lands with the product in someone’s hands, so early on we cared more about getting people to try it than about reach. Astha Jain: That you can’t build a lasting brand on paid acquisition alone. I come from performance marketing, so early on that’s where I put everything. It worked. But CAC only moves in one direction, and when you’re bootstrapped, every rupee of that increase comes straight out of your own margin. There’s no funding round to absorb it. You feel it immediately. Quick commerce has been the real shift for us. It puts the product in front of people at the moment they want it, without paying for the click. For a bootstrapped brand, that changes the economics completely. Astha Jain: A few things landed at once. This generation is more open about the body than the one before it. Sweat, odour, intimate hygiene — these used to be things you quietly worked around and didn’t discuss. Now they get talked about openly, and once people are talking, they start asking why the products they’ve been handed only solve part of the problem. They also research before they buy. That scepticism is what opens the door for a new format. Their lives are also different. Gym in the morning, work through the day, plans in the evening – often without going home in between. A product built for a single application area and a few hours of coverage doesn’t fit that day. And the climate hasn’t got any kinder. Between the heat and the humidity, people were already improvising with talc and reapplication. The demand was there long before anyone named the category. What changed is that a generation finally felt comfortable saying so out loud.
Because it’s been around for thirty years, they read ingredient lists, they ask what alcohol and aluminium salts are actually doing to their skin, and they don’t assume a legacy brand knows best just.
Q: What is one founder lesson you wish you had learnt earlier? What I’d tell myself earlier is to build the channels that don’t inflate – repeat customers, word of mouth, distribution – alongside the ones that do, instead of waiting until the maths forces you to.
Q: Are you seeing any interesting differences in how consumers in Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities approach personal hygiene and fragrance? It’s not that customers in Tier 3 and 4 won’t spend; it’s that they want the spend justified. Quick commerce and ecommerce mean a customer in a Tier 3 city sees the same product on the same day as someone in Delhi.
Fragrance won’t disappear, but it stops being the whole argument. Because they’re the best answer for this climate, sprays have owned the shelf by default, not. Because it’s a cream, you can use it anywhere: underarms, back, feet, wherever you need it, it’s built on Alpha Arbutin and AM-Hebeatol Plus DEO – the formula eliminates and blocks odour-causing bacteria rather than covering the smell, and. Because odour doesn’t stop at the underarms, and the formulation is built for skin anywhere on the body, the format exists.
Q: How do you see the Indian fragrance and deodorant market evolving over the next few years? Astha Jain: The category is going to split along functions. For a long time, deodorant in India was sold as fragrance – buy the spray, get the scent; that’s the pitch. That’s changing. People are starting to treat odour control as a skin and hygiene problem rather than a perfume problem, and once they do, they want a product that actually works for a full day rather than one that smells good for an hour. That opens up formats. Creams, roll-ons , body-wide products, longer-wear formulations- there’s room for all of it now in a way there wasn’t five years ago. Ingredients will get scrutinised harder. Younger buyers already read labels. Brands that can’t answer that clearly will lose ground. And distribution is shifting fast. Quick commerce has changed how personal care gets bought – people order what they need in ten minutes instead of planning a monthly shop. That favours brands who can move quickly and get shelf presence in the new channels, rather than the ones with the biggest legacy retail footprint. The short version: the market moves from fragrance-led to function-led, from one format to many, and from a slow purchase to an instant one. Q: What personal-care trends do you believe are genuinely here to stay, and which ones are just hype? Astha Jain: Here to stay: Ingredient literacy. Once people start reading labels, they don’t stop. This is a permanent shift in how personal care gets sold, and brands that can’t explain their formulations will keep losing ground. Function over fragrance. Buyers increasingly want a product to solve something, not just smell nice while it fails to. That’s a change in what the category is for, not a passing preference. Quick commerce. Ten-minute delivery has genuinely changed how personal care gets bought. That’s infrastructure, not a trend. Mostly hype: Twelve-step routines. Complexity sells content, not results. Most people abandon them within a month, and the products that survive are the ones that fit into a life someone actually has. Ingredient-of-the-month marketing. There’s always a hero ingredient having its moment. Usually it’s a small amount of something real in a formula built around something else. The ingredient isn’t the problem – using it as the entire pitch is. It means nothing specific, which is exactly why it’s everywhere. Certification and a full ingredient list mean something. A vague label doesn’t. Q: What differentiates imfresh from conventional deodorants, body mists and perfumes? Astha Jain: Perfumes and body mists mask odour. They sit on top of the problem, smell good for a few hours, and were never built to do anything else. Conventional deodorants go further but only for underarms, usually in an alcohol-heavy spray. ImFresh is a cream, and that changes what the product can do. The format also lets us do things a spray can’t. No stickiness, no white marks, dermatologically tested, suitable for all skin types. It hydrates and soothes skin instead of drying it out, and the Alpha Arbutin helps brighten dark underarms over time. It’s also not an antiperspirant – we control odour without blocking your body’s natural functions. The short version: a perfume covers, a spray handles one area for a few hours, ImFresh handles the whole body for the whole day – and leaves your skin better than it found it. Astha Jain: The biggest difference isn’t awareness – it’s what people are willing to replace. In metros, a deodorant is one product among several. People own perfume, body mist, and deodorant, and they use them for different occasions. Outside the metros, we see more consolidation. Customers want one product that does the job for the whole day, and if it works, they’ll drop the rest. Price sensitivity also shows up differently than people assume. They’ll pay for something at our price point if it lasts and does more than one thing. That’s partly why our multi-packs do the work they do – the value maths is visible. And the gap in access has closed faster than the gap in habit. What still differs is the routine they’re fitting it into, and that’s where the interesting work is. Q: What are some of the biggest misconceptions consumers still have about whole-body deodorants? Astha Jain: That it’ll stop you sweating. This is the most common one. People assume any deodorant is an antiperspirant. It isn’t – we control odour without blocking your body from doing what it’s meant to do. Sweating is normal. Smelling is a problem worth solving. That a cream will feel heavy or sticky. Most people’s mental image of a cream on skin comes from moisturiser, so they expect residue, white marks, something they’ll notice all day. In practice, it absorbs, and you forget it’s there. This one only really goes away with trial, which is why the first purchase matters more than any amount of messaging. People hear it and assume it means the same underarm product with a broader claim. It doesn’t. That more fragrance means better odour control. Deodorant in India has been sold on scent strength for decades, so a strong initial hit reads as effectiveness. It’s the opposite – a strong top note usually means it’s designed to be noticed early and fade. What matters is whether it’s still working eight hours later. FutureMe Regenerating Serum review: I tried this anti-ageing serum, and here’s what I liked and didn’t Celebrity Makeup Artist Ambika Pillai shares insights on how to choose the right foundation for your skin I Tried and Tested a body deodorant cream for the first time: Here’s how many hours the fragrance survived
“Clean” as a claim. A lot of our feedback from smaller cities runs along the lines of “I used to use perfume daily, now I don’t need to” – that’s a substitution, not an addition. That “whole body” is a marketing line.
