Nobody Designed Baby Skincare for Indian Summers, Until Now - Rohan Rai, EDA Baby & Child

India has always known how to care for its babies. Generations of love, rituals, and trust. But the world is changing. Cities are hotter. The water is harder. Pollution is real. And Indian parents are starting to ask a question that didn't exist a generation ago. Is there actually a baby care brand built for our skin, our summers, and our conditions?

Today's guest decided to answer that. Rohan Rai spent 15 years in his family's precision packaging business, scaling it, restructuring it, building new verticals. His wife, Dr. Sonali Kohli, is a senior practicing dermatologist who has spent her career studying what Indian skin actually needs. Together they co-founded EDA Baby & Child, a baby skincare brand built for Indian climates, Indian water, and Indian rituals.

Rohan and his team spent three years building EDA before they ever opened sales. Two years of stability testing. Three to four months of clinical studies. The brand finally launched in 2025, and they pivoted the model four to five times in 2026 alone. They're bootstrapped. They're shipping to Kenya, Austria, the US and Dubai. And they have one strong opinion that goes against most of the noise in the baby care market today.

Baby care is supposed to be boring. If something works, don't switch. The first thousand days of your child's life are the foundation. You're not running a science project on your child's skin.

This conversation is about what it actually takes to build a science-backed baby care brand in India in 2026, the reality of bootstrapping a D2C business while running a 20 year old packaging company, and why Rohan thinks Indian brands deserve to be trusted globally.

Key Takeaways: Why EDA Is Building Baby Care Differently

The Category Bet:

• India has the climate, the water, and the pollution profile no Western baby brand was designed for, yet most Indian parents still import their baby care
• EDA's product range is built around three rituals only: cleanse, moisturize, nourish, with two products in each of the first two and one in the third
• The brand's hero product is a reimagined Indian massage oil that turns into a milky cleanser when water is added, removing the need for a separate body wash

The Manufacturing Reality:

• Three years from ideation to launch, with two of those years spent on stability testing alone
• Clinical studies took six to seven months, formulations were sourced from Spain, Japan and India
• Rohan operates EDA out of the same office as his 20 year old family packaging business, leveraging that infrastructure as a bootstrapped founder

The Anti-Hype Philosophy:

• The first 1,000 days of a baby's life are the foundation of skin health, and consistency matters more than novelty
• Brand ads, celebrity endorsements and fear-mongering are the biggest reasons Indian parents are confused about baby care
• Dermatologists almost never recommend new active ingredients for babies. They recommend calmer routines and less switching

Q: You're running a 20 year old family packaging business and a baby care brand at the same time. How do you actually balance that?

Rohan: I'm one of the very few privileged men who get to run businesses with their family. The packaging business I run with my father, the D2C business with my wife. It's a tough relationship and a tough business, but I'm grateful that I get to see the best of both sides with the most near and dear ones.

The packaging business is 20 years old. With systems and operational excellence over time, we have somehow brought it to a stage where it's an auto-run business. Of course there's still a lot of involvement from me and my father, but it gives me the leverage to grow EDA. We operate out of the same space. Both my teams sit in the same office. So I can look at both businesses at the same time.

It's challenging. D2C consumes a lot. Honestly, however much it's glamorized today that founders look great everywhere, I think it's a very lonely journey for most D2C founders. Nobody talks about the rest 100,000 companies coming, going, building quietly in stealth mode. You only see stories about funding.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The cheapest way to bootstrap a D2C brand in India is to already own a manufacturing or operations business. Rohan's packaging line, his back office, his CFO, his procurement systems already existed. The D2C business inherits all of it. Most first-time founders pay for that infrastructure with their runway.

Q: Why does India even need a baby care brand built specifically for India?

Rohan: Most of India one is importing products today. They don't believe in Indian consumer brands in the baby care space, at least not yet. Parents are very paranoid, very anxious. Baby care is about trust. There are so many brands pitching to parents, so many ads, so many channels of discovery. Parents are confused not just about skincare but about parenting in general. There is no rule book.

A lot of Indian parents traveling abroad just import products through family. Somebody's sister studying in the US, somebody's brother in the UK, they ship the products here. That's the narrative we want to change. India has diverse climates, diverse water profiles, harder conditions. Our products are performing in India. Our products are now shipped to Kenya. We have customers in Austria, the US, Dubai. When those parents travel back to India and take our products with them, that's a great pride moment for us.

We believe India-ready products are ready for the world. Indian babies have the toughest conditions to grow up in. If the product works here, it works anywhere.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Indian water is harder. Indian summers are hotter. Indian pollution is heavier. Most baby care formulations were tested in European labs on babies who never see any of that. The first brand to actually formulate for the brutal end of the climate spectrum doesn't just win India. It wins the harder version of every other market too.

Q: What's the most overrated piece of advice the baby care industry sells to parents?

Rohan: That you need 10 different products for 10 different activities. People have complicated baby care unnecessarily. Parents are anxious enough. They don't need brands telling them their existing routine is causing cancer. Fear-mongering and then selling products is not the right approach.

I met a lot of pediatricians and dermatologists during this journey. No doctor ever told me we need this active ingredient or that particular formulation. They were all focusing on calmer routines and less paranoia. The PGI a dermatologist would actually give is to stop applying anything for the next 24 to 36 hours and just let the child's skin breathe.

Baby care is supposed to be boring. If you use a brand and it suits your child's skin, just be consistent for the next three years. Don't switch. The first thousand days of a child's life are the most important for building the foundation of skin. The barrier is still developing. It's a sensitive skin. Use products that don't cause harm and stay with them.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Most baby care marketing is built on parental anxiety. Switching is the worst thing a parent can do, and it's exactly what the industry rewards through ads. EDA's positioning is genuinely contrarian: if it's working, don't buy us. The brands that win parental trust in the long run are the ones telling parents to slow down, not buy more.

Q: Tell us about the cleansing bath oil. What is it actually solving for?

Rohan: Every Indian child is massaged today. It's a deep-rooted ritual. Mother, grandmother, japa, nanny, somebody is doing the massage for the first 40 to 50 days. After the massage, you use a soap or a body wash to remove the oil. Now the child is slippery, you want the oil out, you use a body wash, then a shampoo, then maybe more products. You're stripping away the moisture from the skin. You're already causing dryness and irritation right after the massage.

Sonali thought there had to be a better way. We developed a product where you just massage the baby with a few drops, leave it for 10 minutes, put the baby in the tub, add water and it turns into a milky cleanser. So the oil and the cleanser are the same product. We call it the rebirth of a massage oil. It's India's first cleansing bath oil for babies in this format.

That alone took us almost two years to get right. Cleansing bath oils exist as adult products in France, very expensive imported brands. There was nothing like it for Indian babies. We've now had dermatologists and pediatricians recommending it for atopic skin and eczema. The travel kit version of the product means parents don't have to switch when they travel.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The Indian massage ritual isn't going anywhere. The fastest way to build a baby care brand in India is to redesign the rituals that already exist instead of importing rituals from elsewhere. Two years of R&D for a single product is brutal, but the result is a category nobody else owns.

Q: As a parent yourself, should babies actually be massaged? It's a very Indian thing.

Rohan: There's no right or wrong. Indians abroad mostly don't follow the ritual because they don't have help. The privilege of living in India is the ecosystem of help: japas, nannies, family. Abroad it's expensive to hire, so the ritual fades. We developed our oil keeping working moms in mind too because they don't always have time.

I'm not going to comment on the medical side, that's not my area. There's no proven study that massage by itself drives growth. What we can say is that the ritual is deep-rooted, so we kept the heritage and we kept the science. We made the product so that whether you choose to follow the tradition or not, the product itself doesn't cause harm to the baby's developing barrier.

For me personally, the massage became a bonding moment. Weekends, I'd massage my kids. It was fun. Most fathers are scared because the baby is slippery and they don't know what to do after. With our oil, you just leave it for 10 minutes, put the baby in water, and the soap forms itself. It removes that friction.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Tradition is a product feature. Brands that try to argue Indian parents out of massaging or out of any ritual are wasting their marketing spend. EDA's choice to engineer around the ritual instead of replacing it is what makes the product feel inevitable.

Q: What's your honest read on baby sunscreens in India?

Rohan: I'll tell you both sides. From the doctor's lens, below six months avoid sunscreen unless absolutely necessary. If your child has extreme sun exposure, we personally use La Roche-Posay or Isdin on our own kids. They're internationally regulated and recommended by my wife. I cannot personally recommend an Indian brand.

We've been trying to develop a sunscreen for three to four years and we haven't released one yet because there are too many complications in getting a kids' sunscreen right. A lot of Indian brands today are promoting their sunscreens with "USFDA approved" labels, but if you actually check, most of them aren't actually approved. There's a lot of green washing and label washing in the kids' sunscreen space right now. There are filters and active ingredients with UVA, UVB claims that aren't really regulated for kids.

Parents have to do a little more research. Just because a Western brand works in the West doesn't mean it works in India. Indian water, Indian climate, Indian pollution are different. Not necessarily what works abroad will work here. And vice versa.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The most honest signal in the baby care category is a founder telling you he doesn't have a sunscreen yet because he hasn't gotten it right. Three to four years of R&D and they still haven't released it. That's a brand that knows the cost of getting baby care wrong is a child's skin, not a refund.

Q: What about talc? Do babies actually need it?

Rohan: If you ask me what one product parents don't need at all, talc is the answer. It doesn't solve the core issue and can sometimes worsen dryness and irritation. Talc is a controversial subject and from our founder's perspective, we don't want to ever build in that category.

What's worrying is the parent groups online. There's so much community support there, which is great, but a lot of wrong advice gets shared. Someone has a rash, someone says use talc, it'll go away, and the parent panics and tries it. Community spaces are powerful but the quality of advice on baby care needs to be much higher. Always ask a pediatrician or dermatologist before you act.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The baby category has a misinformation problem disguised as community. Mom WhatsApp groups now move more bottles than D2C ads. The cleanest brands are the ones explicitly telling parents to consult a dermat instead of trying random suggestions, even if it costs them a sale.

Q: You're bootstrapped. Do you see that as an advantage or a disadvantage?

Rohan: I don't see being bootstrapped as either. I've had chances to speak to fund managers, brands have reached out for synergy and collaboration. I do believe the right partner adds value at the right time. But for the first phase of building EDA, getting the product right, finding product market fit, our packaging business gave us the discipline.

Maybe our growth has been slower in numbers, but bootstrapping forced fiscal discipline and strategy. I bring 15 years of operational experience from the packaging business. We've seen good days, bad days, all days. I always wanted to build a brand that gives back to society. What better than baby care, where you're holding the parent and child's hand from day one.

When parents reach out to us as founder to founder and say we've changed their child's life, that's victory. Numbers come later. My father and father-in-law both gave me the same advice. Don't run behind money, it'll come. Just put in the right effort and the right consistency. Whether you're a one crore brand or a thousand crore brand, success is subjective.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Bootstrapped doesn't mean small. It means you bought time for the product to be right. EDA spent two years on stability testing because they could afford to. A funded brand with a 24 month runway often can't. The product moat for EDA is actually a financial discipline moat in disguise.

Q: You've already started exports to Kenya. What does it actually take for a small Indian brand to export?

Rohan: It's a long process. Regulations, paperwork, label registration in each country, it adds up. For us the first export opportunity came through a customer who turned into a partner. Right in our first year we were in Kenya. My 15 years in the pharmaceutical packaging side gave us a network we could lean on, people who helped us with regulations.

We were also in talks with GCC countries but had to step back because of the current geopolitical situation. Long term we want to be in different parts of the world. People should be able to trust Indian science-backed brands the way they trust international brands today. India has the best scientists, the best doctors. If you go to senior hospitals abroad, it's Indians everywhere. So our science deserves to travel too. Not just Ayurvedic creams, but science-backed Indian brands.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Indian baby care exports are still mostly Ayurveda-coded. The world buys Indian heritage but rarely buys Indian science. Brands like EDA that lead with formulation discipline and clinical studies, not turmeric and ashwagandha, are the ones who can actually compete with European baby brands on their home turf.

Q: What's been the hardest part of building EDA in the last year?

Rohan: Pivoting. We did 12 to 15 road shows in Hyderabad, Bombay, Pune, Ahmedabad in the last year. We met thousands of parents. What we realized is that parents have over-complicated baby care because brands have over-complicated it for them. They were buying products in panic, then a celebrity ad, then a switch, then a rash, then a dermat, then a different switch. Nothing was suiting and the kid was getting worse.

Once we saw that pattern, we had to pivot the entire brand narrative. We stopped trying to sell more products. We started telling parents to do less. Use whatever works. If it's not us, that's fine. Stick to a calm routine for three years. That's a hard pivot for a brand because you're literally telling people not to switch to you.

It worked though. The customers we got after that pivot are sticky. They actually use the products consistently. The kids' skin is responding. We've pivoted four to five times in the last year on positioning, range, channels. That's the journey of every founder. Nobody teaches you that.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The bravest brand pivot in the baby care category is telling parents to do less. Most brands want maximum product attach per family. EDA went the other way and is winning loyalty in exchange. The honest brand always wins eventually, but it takes nerve to give up short-term margin for long-term trust.

Q: How are you using AI in EDA today?

Rohan: Today you have the power of using AI. You can read books from founders who've already done it. I'm reading Zero to Scale by Arundham Paul, who built Atomberg. I did Arjun Vaidya's D2C course two years back. The book and the course gave me playbooks I didn't have. As an entrepreneur, you don't know everything. Even in packaging, I didn't know D2C. It's learning on the go.

For small things like converting my company from an LLP to a private limited, I had to delist all our products from marketplaces and then relist them. Nobody told me that. AI helps with those playbooks. We use it for content, for research, for understanding consumer behavior in markets we haven't physically visited yet. The bigger thing is, you have to teach your team how to use AI in the right way. Empowerment is the play, not replacement.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: AI didn't formulate EDA. Two years of stability testing did. But AI is now compressing every other layer: market research, content, regulatory paperwork, channel learnings. The founders who'll win the next decade are the ones who treat AI as their second-most expensive employee, after themselves.

Q: What's your advice for second generation entrepreneurs joining the family business or starting their own?

Rohan: Second generation entrepreneurs joining their parents' business is a real challenge today. Either they avoid it entirely, or family offices invest from the side without the kids actually getting their hands dirty. Being part of a bootstrapped family business teaches you the discipline you can't replicate elsewhere. I joined my father's packaging business when it wasn't fancy. We had a lot of issues. We rebuilt it together.

For young founders today, my advice is simple. Don't lose hope when you see other brands performing well. Patience matters. Sometimes just being there as a brand is undervalued. Even if you're doing nothing special, just continuing to exist is hard, and that's not nothing. When you see competitors throwing a celebrity ad or raising another round, you'll feel anxious. Even we still feel that. But your time will come.

My professor, Boman Moradian, taught me a phrase. GOYA. Get on your ass. Get out into the market, meet people, do things yourself. Magic doesn't happen because you sat at a desk and ran Meta ads. Effort and consistency go a long way. Whether you take 10 crores from an investor or build a one crore brand on your own, the principle is the same.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: GOYA is the most underrated startup framework of the decade. Most founders confuse activity for progress. They run dashboards. They tweak ads. They ignore the phone calls. The founders who actually win are the ones who walk into the market, talk to 4,500 parents, and pivot the whole brand based on what they hear.

Final Thoughts: Built in India, Built for the World

Rohan's reframe: "We want to be the brand parents need from day one. We want to give parents worry-free products. The founder of the company being a practicing dermatologist has taken care of it. So you don't have to worry."

The bottom line: Rohan and Sonali's story is a slow story. Three years from ideation to launch. Two years of stability testing. Multiple pivots in the last year alone. No shortcuts. No celebrity-led launch. No unicorn round to start with. In a category obsessed with virality and noise, EDA is making the contrarian bet that calm, science-backed routines will outlast the latest trend cycle.

For founders in baby care, wellness, or any high-trust category, the lesson is clear. The brands that win parental loyalty are not the ones with the loudest ads. They're the ones that take time to formulate properly, communicate clearly, and explicitly tell consumers when not to switch. EDA's growth philosophy and Rohan's GOYA mindset are the same thing. Show up. Do the work. Don't run behind money. The numbers follow the discipline.

For everyone watching the Indian baby care space, EDA's positioning matters beyond its own P&L. If a science-backed Indian baby care brand can ship to Kenya, Austria and the US in year one of operations, the conversation about Indian brands being only good for the domestic market is officially outdated. The next decade of baby care is going to be built in markets like India where the climate, water and pollution are tougher than anywhere else. EDA is one of the brands that can lead that wave.

Q: How can people connect with you and learn more about EDA Baby & Child?

Rohan: Please follow EDA on Instagram and check out our website. We're available pan-India and we ship to multiple countries. I'm also starting a conversation show called The Parent Brain next month. It's a space for parents to think together, be together, and avoid the noise of the baby care industry. The whole idea is to give parents that hope that they're not alone in this. I'll share it with you when it goes live.

Final words: The next great Indian baby care brand isn't going to look like the loudest brand on Instagram. It's going to look like Rohan and Sonali. A bootstrapped operator and a practicing dermat building slowly, formulating carefully, exporting honestly, and asking parents to do less, not more. The first thousand days of a child matter more than any campaign. If you're a parent, find a routine that works and stay with it. If you're a founder, find a problem that matters and stay with it. The compounding looks invisible until it isn't.

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