FROM ANCIENT INDIA, A NEW LINE
Farm-to-table and organic have become ubiquitous in the culinary world — and now Shrankhla Holecek is putting those same covetable qualities front and center in the beauty industry. Uma Oils, her year-old skin care and wellness line, relies on luxurious oils that her family has produced for generations.
“In many ways, I feel a little disingenuous calling myself a founder of a company,” says the 34-year-old. “We had all these formulas in my family already, so I didn’t have to invent anything. In truth, I play more of a storytelling role — bringing these formulas that are hundreds of years old to the marketplace.”
According to Holecek, her ancestors served as the physicians to India’s royal family, practicing Ayurvedic medicine, a holistic approach to healing. And for centuries, Holecek’s kinfolk have harvested and distilled the crops on their land, the majority of it in central India, to make high-quality essential oils.
The organic ingredients — including roses, jasmine flowers, chamomile and sandalwood — coupled with an artisanal manufacturing process, have led beauty brands such as Tom Ford and Estee Lauder, as well as food-flavoring outfits, to use the oils in their products.
In addition to its website, Uma Oils is sold at prestige retailers and spas. Space NK’s San Francisco and Marin locations recently started carrying the line.
Growing up, Holecek — who split her childhood between India and England, and later earned an engineering degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India — remembers observing many Ayurvedic principles. For example, her Saturday evenings typically entailed a hair massage. Leaving the oils in overnight and washing them out in the morning was intended to provide moisture and nutrition deep into the follicles.
“These were practices that I thought were the norm,” she says, “but later learned that they were not a part of all cultures.”
After moving to Los Angeles about a decade ago to enroll at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, Holecek noticed that Californians were particularly focused on the provenance of their food: It wasn’t enough to shop at Whole Foods for organic produce; consumers wanted to go to the markets and talk to the farmers who cultivated the produce.
She had an entrepreneurial epiphany: “The
chain of command existed for organic food, but not for skin care,” she explains. “And this was not lost on me.”
Holecek envisioned a business where she was closely involved from start to finish. “No matter what the claims of most companies are,” she notes, “the truth is, they don’t have access to understand where their ingredients are coming from.” Which is a key differentiator with Uma Oils: The lack of a middleman allows for the ability to maintain the integrity of the oils.
In 2015, she left her consulting job at McKinsey & Co. to concentrate on the startup. She spent a year determining which formulas to market — those that would have the most appeal to a broad audience — and developing the brand itself.
The packaging, Holecek realized, would be critical. “I wanted a very modern aesthetic but didn’t want to lose the soul of India,” she says. Uma Oil’s bottles are adorned with botanical line drawings — the handiwork of her sister, Bhoomika Upadhyaya — and the labels bordered in gold.
Among the face, hair, body and wellness oils, Holecek says the anti-aging varieties are the bestsellers. The eye oil is integral to her own daily regimen: “My eyes show the most amount of stress and age,” she says.
While some of the products may be tied to ancient anecdotes — the baby oil was reportedly concocted for a colicky princess — Holecek is betting that today’s buyers will be drawn to details like the origin of Uma Oil’s natural ingredients and the heritage formulas that it employs. “I hope that this kind of transparency not only resonates with customers,” she says, “but also creates more education around this topic.”