Om Home Gives South Asian Beauty Brands An E-Commerce Home To Celebrate Their Unique Identity

Om Home is shining a spotlight on South Asian beauty brands that top beauty retailers are snoozing on.

The e-commerce destination launched Oct. 1 with six skincare, makeup, body care, fragrance and home decor brands not sold at Sephora and Ulta Beauty: Passport to Beauty, Plantkos, Purearth, Ready Set Jet, Shayde Beauty and UMM Skincare. Om Home is sourcing brands from all over the world that aren’t afraid to flaunt their South Asian heritage and address melanated skin. It expects to scale up to 100 brands in the next year, with at least 50% coming from South Asian countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. 

Anita Nath, founder and CEO of the e-tailer, argues South Asian beauty brands on the shelves of leading retailers tend to compromise their ethnic ties to appeal to Western audiences, and they don’t have to at Om Home. “There’s this almost unwritten rule. If you’re going to go ethnic, then you have to tone it down, make sure it’s not in your packaging and ensure that you have someone that is based within the U.S. that can actually push your product,” she says. “There’s almost like this innate discrimination that’s put in place when it comes to South Asian beauty brands.”

Major American chains have certainly taken notice of a wave of South Asian beauty brands as they look to capitalize on interest in Ayurveda, the holistic medical system developed in India, and practices associated with it such as hair oiling and growth of the South Asian population in the United States. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Asian Indian population in the U.S. jumped over 50% between 2010 and 2020 to just under 4.4 million people. By 2024, it hit approximately 5.4 million people. 

Over the past few years, Fable & Mane, Kulfi, Ranavat, Shaz & Kiks, Mango People, Lion Pose and Aavrani have entered Sephora, and Live Tinted, Urban Veda and Neimat Artisan Perfumery have landed at Ulta. Still, there remains plenty of South Asian beauty brands that aren’t available at Sephora and Ulta. Nath reports many of the brands she’s communicated with about Om Home have been rebuffed by big beauty retail players. She says, “Some of these brands have hundreds of thousands of followers and hundreds of thousands of customers that purchase with them.”

Om Home operates on a wholesale traditional model of holding inventory and curates products around three central pillars: quality, efficacy and clinical trials. Nath checks efficacy by testing products herself and studying customer reviews online. She won’t bring in brands that haven’t conducted clinical trials. 

“Clinical trials are very black and white. You either have them or you don’t,” she says. “If brands don’t have them, I usually don’t even bother asking them to send their products over because I want to ensure that they’ve gone through that.” 

Om Home will leverage social media to raise awareness through product giveaways and live chats with brand partners. It’s tapped South Asian influencers, entrepreneurs and celebrities Richa Moorjani, Aditi Mayer and Megha Rao to spread the word. An email newsletter is in the works. Nath says the business is targeting customers between the ages of 20 and 55 years across South Asian ethnicities and beyond.

Cultivating a strong Om Home community is a big goal for Nath. Pointing to the symbolism of the Hindu sound and invocation “om,” which signifies an individual’s connection to the universe and Nath embedded in the name of her business, she says, “I am more so focusing on the stories of the brands and building brands. I don’t want Om Home to necessarily just be a product flogger, but instead become a brand itself and a community.”

Nath discloses Self-funded Om Home took a few hundred thousand dollars to get off the ground. A longtime marketer with stints at IBM, Xerox, Westpac, Suncorp and Amazon agency Knack Collective, she’s saving money by relying on her expertise to market Om Home and assemble its community. In the future, she hopes to create an incubator program to help South Asian beauty brands in scaling their retail reach.

“I have extremely large aspirational goals as to what I want to achieve with Om Home,” says Nath. “I want there to be beauty and diversity in the brands that we have, but I want those brands to be successful in their own right.”