Our Story

I never planned to start a shampoo brand.

I just wanted my hair to finally feel normal.

Ever since I was a kid, I had dry hair.

Not a little dry. The kind that blows everywhere as soon as there's a bit of wind. It was thin. It was greasy at the roots and dry at the ends, both at the same time. I couldn't do anything with it. It just did what it wanted.

And it didn't get better as I got older.

So I tried a lot of different things. Shampoos, conditioners, natural solutions. Some helped for a day or two. Then my hair was right back to how it always was.

Nothing really worked.

WHAT I FOUND ON THE LABEL

At some point I turned my shampoo around and read the back. It was full of synthetic ingredients that strip your hair of its natural oils. I had been using it for years.

So I switched to "natural" shampoo bars. I tried every one I could find.

But when I read those labels, almost all of them had the same thing in them: a synthetic surfactant called SCI (sodium cocoyl isethionate). It's made using ethylene oxide, a chemical known to cause cancer. Organic, plant based, sulfate free. It didn't matter. SCI was still in there.

So I stopped using all of it. Not just my shampoo. My toothpaste and my skincare too.

THE ORIGINAL HAIR WASH

I started looking for a bar that was actually natural. And I started asking a different question: how did people wash their hair before there were any labs?

Then in one of my classes at university, I saw a slide about a small organic shop near me that sold shampoo bars. One of them was made with shikakai. So I went and bought it.

When I looked into shikakai, I found out it's the original hair wash. It's written about in old Ayurvedic books, and people in India have used it for 4,500 years, long before shampoo existed. It cleans your hair without stripping its natural oils.

THE FIRST FEW MONTHS

I used that bar for a few months, and it worked really well.

My hair wasn't dry anymore. The roots weren't greasy. It stopped blowing everywhere. For the first time, it just felt like normal hair.

WHY I STARTED HIKAKAI

About a year and a half later, I thought: if this worked so well for me, there must be a lot of people it can help too.

So I tried to have it made in Belgium, where I'm from. I went to a soap maker in Brussels and asked him to make it for me. He said no. It was too much work, and the ingredients were too expensive to import.

FINDING THE FACTORY

So I started looking in India, where shikakai comes from. I thought that would be easy. It wasn't.

I spent literally weeks looking for a real Ayurvedic factory. Most of them only make commercial products now. They couldn't make the original recipe anymore.

Then I finally found an original Ayurvedic factory in Madurai that could. I visited India, we did the whole production and development together, and in the end we were able to make the original again.

OUR FIRST BATCH

Our first batch was 500 bars. Made by hand, with 100% organic and edible ingredients, following the original Ayurvedic palm leaf manuscripts.

HOW IT'S MADE TODAY

Every bar is still made in that same factory. The herbs are cooked for two days with organic oils. The soap is mixed by hand, poured into wooden moulds and cut by hand. Then it rests for two weeks before it's packed. If a batch doesn't come out right, we throw it away.