India's First Fragrance-Led Body Care Brand: The Love Co Story
I want to tell you something true about why The Love Co exists, and to do that I have to start with a moment that still embarrasses me slightly.
I was in a pharmacy in Mumbai, sometime in 2019, looking at the body lotions shelf. I had spent the previous ten minutes in the same pharmacy being very serious about a vitamin C serum — comparing percentages, reading actives, thinking carefully about which formulation would be best for my skin. And then I turned to the body lotion section and picked up the same bottle I had been picking up for years, without reading a single word on the label.
Not because it was good. Because it was familiar.
That was the beginning. But it was not the whole story.
What I Found When I Started Looking
The more I looked at the Indian body care market, the more I understood why people defaulted to whatever was familiar.
The mass-market option was effective enough at basic moisturisation, scented with something broadly inoffensive. Not an experience — a transaction.
The imported luxury option: beautiful packaging, beautiful fragrance, beautiful price tags. Products built for European or American skin, referencing European or American cultural touchstones. Almost never Indian. Always carrying the implicit message that India was a market, not an origin.
Both options were missing something. The mass-market products were missing the sensory dimension. The imported luxury products were missing the soul — the understanding that India has one of the most extraordinary fragrance heritages on earth.
Nobody had built a brand that was genuinely Indian in its fragrance DNA, genuinely premium in its formulation, and genuinely committed to the idea that body care could be transformative rather than merely adequate.
Why Fragrance, Specifically
I did not set out to build a fragrance brand. I set out to build a body care brand I would actually want to use.
But every time I tried to define what was missing, I kept coming back to the same word: feeling. Not the skin-feel of a formula. The feeling of being cared for. The feeling of something that made the act of applying body lotion seem worth doing slowly.
And that feeling was almost always connected to scent.
So fragrance became the organising principle. Not because I had a master plan, but because I kept following the thread of what actually made a body care experience feel meaningful, and that thread kept leading back to scent.
Kannauj, and the Education I Didn't Expect
The next thing I did was go to Kannauj.
Kannauj is a small city in Uttar Pradesh that has been producing attars — pure, oil-based perfumes made from botanical sources — for over four centuries. The technique used there, deg-bhapka distillation, is unlike any modern perfume production method. Copper vessels. Slow heat. Rose petals by the kilogram. The fragrance migrating through a bamboo pipe into sandalwood oil over several hours.
I sat with the distillers there and understood something I had not fully articulated before: India's relationship with fragrance is not aesthetic. It is a tradition in which scent is understood to be a carrier of feeling, of memory, of spiritual state.
I wanted to bring that understanding into body care.
What TLC Is, Honestly
The Love Co is India's first fragrance-led body care brand. We design the fragrance first. Every product starts with a scent brief — a considered olfactory intention. We ask: what do we want someone to feel when they use this?
Then we build a formula that serves that intention. The skin-care functionality is real. But the formula exists to express and sustain the fragrance, not the other way around.
The India Piece
India does not need to borrow its beauty credibility from elsewhere. It has Kannauj rose and Mysore sandalwood and Tamil Nadu vetiver and mitti attar. It has four hundred years of attar-making tradition and a cultural relationship with scent that is more sophisticated and more emotionally grounded than almost anything the Western fragrance industry has produced.
A brand built from these roots does not need to apologise for being Indian. It needs to translate that heritage into something that a twenty-eight-year-old in Bengaluru or Hyderabad or Pune finds genuinely beautiful and genuinely their own.
That is what TLC is trying to do.
What I Want You to Feel
When you use a TLC product, I want you to feel two things.
The first is the feeling of someone who is taking care of themselves properly. Not because they have to. Because they have chosen to.
The second is a sense of recognition. The feeling that this particular scent is somehow already yours. Not foreign. Not borrowed. Something that belongs to this soil, to this air, to this specific and irreplaceable part of the world.
— Hemang Jain, Founder, The Love Co
Return to the complete guide: What Is Fragrance-Led Body Care?
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