In an exclusive interview with Indian Startup Times, Zen Nanavati, co-founder of Dence, explains why he moved from nearly a decade across healthcare, pharmaceuticals, consulting, FMCG and brand management to build a bodycare brand. His conviction was straightforward: while skincare and most personal care categories in India had evolved rapidly, bodycare had largely remained unchanged for decades—and that gap presented a clear opportunity.

From pharma and corporate strategy to D2C

Zen began his career in pharma, working at Glenmark and Sun Pharma before moving into broader company strategy roles and eventually consumer health at IQVIA. As a pharmacist, he understood ingredients and their potential, but he had not had the chance to act on that knowledge directly. Working in consumer health gave him a front-row seat to India’s D2C boom. “Watching brands being built from the ground up made me want to build one of my own,” he says. That exposure, combined with his formulation and strategy experience, led to the creation of Dence.

The gap: a bodycare shelf frozen in time

Around 2023–24, while studying market dynamics and consumer behaviour, Nanavati and his team noticed that skincare in India was booming and nearly every major personal care category had evolved except bodycare. Offline shelves, he says, still looked largely unchanged from a decade earlier. That observation became the starting point for Dence. The brand was built to bring modern formulation, active-led skincare thinking and a more engaging consumer experience to a category that had long been treated as basic.

Why the name Dence?

The name has roots in Zen’s pharma background. In the Indian pharmaceutical industry, brand names are often created by combining molecule names with the indications they address. Dence draws from “DEep skiN care” and “fragranCEs”—DE, N and CE.

It also reflects the brand’s philosophy. Every Dence formulation is, in Nanavati’s words, “dence-ly packed” with skincare actives and fragrances. The name was designed to be distinctive, easy to remember and aligned with a product-first approach.

Product first, validated by consumers

Dence’s founding principle was to build products before building marketing. The team’s first formulation initially felt strong internally, but consumer trials gave them a reality check. That experience reinforced the need to rely on data and consumer feedback rather than instinct alone. Over the next eight to nine months, the company tested with more than 300 participants across seven rounds of consumer trials to arrive at its current formulations. Zen believes a good product will always bring customers back.  Alongside efficacy, the brand wanted to bring joy to the category. Dence uses a playful, colourful visual identity as a deliberate contrast to the white, black, grey and blue packaging that dominates bodycare shelves.

Early challenges: admin, patience and founder mindset

In the early stages, Zen says a surprising amount of time went into bureaucracy and administration. At a stage when founders need to focus on customers and marketing, paperwork and operational tasks can consume significant attention. He also had to manage the mental pressure of tracking competitors. Seeing other brands scale quickly could lead to self-doubt, but he reminds himself that building a business is a marathon. “It’s five years versus five months,” he says. His approach is to keep doing things right, keep showing up and let results follow. Another shift was the loss of conventional boundaries between work and personal time. As a founder, there are no fixed office hours, and the first weekend after starting Dence made that change clear.

Capital allocation and funding plans

Dence is currently bootstrapped and is now actively looking to raise funds. In close to six months of operations, the company has closed ₹1.5 crore in sales, with nearly 85% coming through offline channels. Of the capital invested so far, roughly 40–50% has gone into product development, packaging and manufacturing. Another 25–30% has gone into marketing and customer acquisition, while the remaining 15–20% covers logistics, branding, warehousing and team building. With the upcoming raise, Dence plans to expand its online presence, scale across quick commerce and e-commerce platforms, and invest further in R&D, manufacturing and team development.

Building an experience-centric bodycare brand

Zen wants to build a brand that consumers do not want to leave. Nanavati believes offline retail still offers strong potential for brand building, especially when consumers can experience a product first-hand. The company is steadily scaling online, but its early strategy is focused on staying close to consumers and building genuine product affinity. For Zen, bodycare is not just a functional category it is an experience, and the brand aims to make that experience more engaging than what the market has traditionally offered.

People first: lessons from corporate life

Zen says nine years in corporate roles taught him many things, but the biggest learning was people management. Building offline distribution means winning over teams, distributors, retailers, purchase managers and modern trade store owners each with different personalities and priorities. His guiding principle is simple: people first. Whether dealing with a CEO or a retail store picker, he treats everyone with humility and gratitude. That approach, he says, has helped him build relationships and navigate the complexities of offline retail.

Long-term vision: changing the standard of bodycare

Zen’s long-term vision is to build a strong omnichannel brand that is present wherever the consumer is. More importantly, Zen wants Dence to be known as the brand that changed the basic standard of bodycare in India. The company plans to do this by being available in channels that have long offered consumers only the bare minimum in bodycare. Over the next five years, Dence aims to reach 200 cities and more than 30,000 stores.

Why Dence matters in personal care?

For Indian consumers, bodycare has often been a functional afterthought compared with skincare. Dence’s approach of active-led formulations, consumer-validated products, colourful branding and a strong offline-first distribution strategy aims to turn bodycare into a more considered, experience-driven category. In speaking to Indian Startup Times, Zen Nanavati made clear that Dence is not trying to be another generic personal care brand. It is trying to raise the baseline for bodycare in India starting with better products, better experiences and wider access.

Interview By: Sejal Thakur