There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from noticing an absence rather than an opportunity. For Sainath Jain, that absence became visible while living in Europe, where grooming was simply part of how men moved through the day, not an occasion-driven afterthought. Returning to India, he found a category split between mass-market products and women’s skincare loosely repackaged for men, with very little built genuinely around a man’s skin, habits or lifestyle. In 2020, he founded Hivado to close that gap, not with more noise, but with restraint. We spoke to Jain about the unusually wide arc that led him here, what masculinity means inside the Hivado universe, and what it will actually take for an Indian brand to earn global luxury standing.

Hivado was founded in 2020 with a very deliberate vision to build an Indian luxury men’s personal care brand that could stand alongside the world’s finest. In a category dominated by mass-market repurposed skincare and global legacy names, what did you see that convinced you there was not just a gap but a real opportunity for something truly premium and truly Indian?

I think the opportunity became very clear to me when I was living in Europe. I noticed that grooming was simply a part of everyday life for men there. It wasn’t treated as something superficial or something you only thought about when you had a particular occasion. It was just part of how you looked after yourself.

When I came back to India, I realised we hadn’t really built that culture yet. The choices available to men were largely either generic mass-market products or products that were essentially women’s skincare repackaged and marketed to men. There was very little that felt like it had been genuinely thought through for a man, his skin, his lifestyle, his habits and even the way he wants to experience a product.

That was the gap we saw. And for me, it wasn’t just a gap in products, it was a gap in how the category was being approached.

We felt there was an opportunity to build something that was distinctly Indian in its origin but international in its ambition. Something where performance came first, but the design, experience and attention to detail were equally important. That’s really where Hivado began, with the belief that Indian men didn’t need to choose between efficacy and luxury.

Your background spans engineering, luxury brand management at ESSEC, editorial work at NOWNESS, heritage luxury at S.T. Dupont, and AI-powered skincare at OuiSkin. That is an unusually wide arc. What is the thread that connects all of it and how does each chapter show up in the way Hivado is built?

Looking back, it does seem like a fairly unusual journey, but at the time each experience felt quite separate.

Engineering gave me a very process-oriented way of thinking. I tend to look at problems as systems, what is the actual problem, why does it exist, and how do you build something that solves it properly?

Then ESSEC and my experience with luxury brands taught me something very different. I started understanding that luxury isn’t simply about making something expensive or making something look beautiful. It’s about intention, detail, consistency and the experience you create around a product.

My time at NOWNESS exposed me to storytelling and culture, while S.T. Dupont gave me a closer understanding of heritage, craftsmanship and what it takes to build a brand with a strong point of view.

And then OuiSkin brought me back to technology, consumer behaviour and skincare. It was also where I got to experience entrepreneurship more directly.

Hivado sits somewhere at the intersection of all those experiences. The engineering side makes me very particular about process and performance. The luxury experience influences how we think about design and brand-building. And the skincare and technology experience keeps us curious about research, innovation and consumer behaviour.

So perhaps the common thread is really about trying to understand why something works, and then finding a better way of doing it.

Hivado is rooted in research into men’s skin biology, lifestyle, and behavioural patterns specifically. That sounds obvious, but the reality is that most grooming products marketed to men are simply repackaged skincare. What does formulating genuinely for men’s skin actually require and what does the industry consistently get wrong?

The first thing is recognising that men aren’t simply women with different packaging. Men’s skin has its own characteristics, and then you have differences in lifestyle, grooming habits and behaviour. Things like shaving, exposure to pollution, sweating, exercise and the fact that many men don’t necessarily want a ten-step routine all influence how a product should be developed.

For us, the starting point is understanding the need rather than starting with a product category. What is the consumer actually dealing with? What would make his routine easier? What would make him want to use the product consistently?

I also think the industry sometimes overcomplicates skincare. There is a tendency to keep adding products and steps when, for many men, the better answer is actually a smaller number of products that perform extremely well.

That’s the philosophy we’ve tried to follow at Hivado, simple, effective and refined. The product has to work first. Everything else comes after that.

You’ve described grooming at Hivado not as a routine but as an elevated self-care ritual. That’s a significant cultural reframe for the Indian man, who has historically been socialised away from precisely that kind of intentionality around his appearance. How do you shift that perception and what are you seeing change in real time?

I don’t think you change that perception by telling men that they need to care more about grooming. You change it by making the experience feel relevant to them. For a long time, self-care was associated with vanity, particularly for men. I think that is changing because the younger consumer increasingly sees grooming as part of how he presents himself and, more importantly, how he feels about himself.

The shift we’re seeing is that grooming is becoming less about impressing somebody else and more about feeling confident and put together in your own skin. That’s why we use the word ritual. A ritual is something you intentionally make time for. It can be five minutes in the morning, but those five minutes can still be yours.

And I think that’s where modern masculinity is evolving. You can care about how you look, care about your skin, appreciate design and still have a very grounded sense of who you are. Those things aren’t contradictory.

Every aspect of Hivado, from formulation to packaging, is designed to reflect contemporary luxury. Design at that level is a language, not an aesthetic choice. What does Hivado’s design language say, and who is it speaking to?

For us, design is really about restraint. We didn’t want Hivado to look loud or overly decorative. We wanted it to feel confident without needing to announce itself. The design language is clean, considered and purposeful because that’s also how we think about the products.

The consumer we’re speaking to appreciates details. He may not necessarily want a product covered in branding, but he’ll notice how the bottle feels in his hand, how it sits in his bathroom, how the product dispenses, how the fragrance develops and, ultimately, whether it performs.

So design for us isn’t decoration around the formula. It’s part of the product experience. I think contemporary luxury is moving in that direction as well. It’s becoming less about obvious symbols of status and more about quality, functionality and the pleasure of using something that has been thoughtfully made.

You co-founded Hivado with Shradha Mutha. Building a luxury brand is an intensely personal creative act and doing it with a co-founder requires a very specific kind of alignment. How do you two divide the vision, and what does the other person see that you would miss on your own?

Shradha and I have been building Hivado together from the beginning, so there isn’t always a very neat division between what is mine and what is hers. What works well is that we naturally look at the brand from different angles. I’m often very focused on the larger system, product, process, positioning and where we want to take the business. Shradha brings a very strong sensitivity to the consumer experience, aesthetics and the finer details.

And because we are both so close to the brand, we challenge each other quite a lot. I think that’s actually important. When you’re building something this personal, you don’t need someone who agrees with you all the time. You need someone who can tell you when something isn’t right.

There are decisions we arrive at very quickly and others where we go back and forth for days. But the underlying vision has always been aligned; we want to build something we genuinely believe should exist.

Hivado is positioned as a movement that challenges traditional perceptions of masculinity alongside being a grooming brand. That’s a bigger cultural brief than most personal care brands take on. What does masculinity look like in the Hivado universe and why does that definition matter for the products you create?

For me, masculinity isn’t about fitting into a particular mould.

It’s about confidence, individuality and being comfortable enough with yourself to make your own choices. That includes how you dress, what you use, how you take care of yourself and what you choose to prioritise.

We’ve grown up with a fairly narrow idea of what a man is supposed to be, tough, understated, not too concerned about appearance. I think that definition is naturally expanding.

The modern Indian man can be ambitious and vulnerable, athletic and design-conscious, traditional in some ways and completely contemporary in others. None of those things cancel each other out.

That matters to Hivado because we don’t want to create products based on stereotypes of men. We want to create products for real men and the way they actually live today.

If Hivado were a material, not a fragrance or a formula but the physical substance the brand is made of, what would it be and why?

I’d probably say brushed metal.

There is something very Hivado about metal. It’s strong and functional, but when it’s finished well, it can also be incredibly refined. It has a sense of permanence to it.

I also like that it doesn’t try too hard to be luxurious. The material itself has an inherent quality, and the way you finish it determines how it feels.

That’s quite close to how I think about Hivado. We want the substance to be strong, the science, the performance, the functionality, and then the design and experience bring refinement to it.

You’re building a globally relevant luxury brand from Bengaluru. India has produced extraordinary luxury craftsmanship for centuries but has rarely exported it as a luxury brand in the modern sense. What needs to be true for Hivado to change that, and how close are you?

I think the first step is believing that we can. India has never had a shortage of talent, craftsmanship or creativity. What we have historically lacked is consistency in building global consumer brands around those strengths.

For Hivado, being Indian isn’t something we want to hide behind a global aesthetic. At the same time, we don’t want to be defined only by being an Indian brand. The ambition is to build a brand that can stand on its own, wherever the consumer encounters it.

That requires patience. You have to build the product, the brand language, the distribution and the consumer trust at the same time. Luxury isn’t built overnight, and we’re very conscious of that.

We’re still on the journey, but I think the opportunity is much bigger today because the Indian consumer himself has changed. He is more exposed to global brands, more discerning and increasingly willing to pay for quality and experience.

So the question isn’t whether an Indian brand can build a global luxury identity. I think we know it can. The question is whether we’re disciplined enough to build it properly over time.

What is coming next from Hivado and what does the complete men’s wellness ecosystem you’re building ultimately look and feel like?

We’re thinking beyond individual grooming products.

The larger ambition has always been to build a self-care ecosystem for men. Grooming is the entry point, but the opportunity is much broader, the way men care for their skin, body, hair, wellness and overall sense of self.

We don’t want to build a brand that simply keeps adding SKUs. Every new category needs to have a reason to exist and needs to fit into the larger philosophy.

Ultimately, I’d like Hivado to become a brand that a man can grow with. Something that accompanies him through different stages of his life, where the products remain relevant because they are built around his evolving needs rather than short-lived trends.

If we can do that while building an Indian brand with genuinely global relevance, I think that would be the most meaningful measure of what we’re trying to accomplish.

What comes through most clearly in talking to Jain isn’t ambition, though there’s plenty of it, it’s restraint. A brand built by someone who has sat inside luxury houses, editorial rooms and engineering problems alike tends to know the difference between looking considered and actually being considered, and Hivado seems built on that distinction rather than around it. Brushed metal is, in the end, a fairly precise metaphor for the brand itself: unshowy, functional, quietly confident that its own substance will do the talking, if the finish is done properly. Whether Hivado becomes the global-facing Indian luxury brand Jain is betting on will come down to exactly the discipline he keeps returning to, not a single hero product or a viral moment, but years of getting the small, unglamorous decisions right. If Indian luxury is finally ready to be exported on its own terms rather than borrowed ones, Hivado is a fairly compelling place to start watching.

Follow Best List India for the culture, conversations, and ideas worth paying attention to.