In the Spotlight

Talking Heads: Mauli Rituals Founder Anita Kaushal

Talking Heads: Mauli Rituals Founder Antia Kaushal | Beauty Expert

International Women’s Day 2019: Balance For Better

In our Talking Heads Series to celebrate International Women’s Day, we reached out to the beauty brands that are breaking the boundaries to pave the way for positive change in 2019. One of our most family-oriented brands, balancing luxury beauty with botanical Ayurvedic remedies, we were fortunate to speak to Anita Kaushal, founder of Mauli Rituals.

The Video Interview

Mauli Rituals: Holistic Healing for the Modern Millenial

Anita is in awe of the women around her

When you meet Anita Kaushal, the first thing you notice is the way she radiates positive energy and a thirst for life. She is thrilled to be with the Beauty Expert team for the day and looks just as effortlessly glamorous as we expected her to. When we ask about who her beauty icons are, rather than list her favourite celebrities, Antia has a much more real-life approach;

“Beauty icons? I don’t have one, because I look at everybody in this room and there’s something about them that I admire, all women are special.”

“There’s something that makes me think, she’s got it going on. My mother influenced me a great deal. She’s very simple, very stylish. Her favourite beauty products were face oil and red lipstick.”

Beauty plays a role in every element of her life

Never satisfied with things being ordinary, Antia likes things to be beautiful; “I’m pretty obsessed by beauty. I don’t just mean lipsticks, I mean by things being beautiful. My office needs to feel beautiful, my home needs to feel beautiful. When I open my wardrobe it needs to feel beautiful. It moves me to the core, I just like things to look beautiful.”

We could almost call Anita a female pioneer

What does Anita love about being a woman? “I love that we’re natural creators, we are homemakers, we get to care for people, we get to dress up, we get to have so many choices.”

“The easier question is what don’t you love about being a woman? And actually, there’s really nothing.”

Anita has a few words of wisdom for her younger self

To her younger self, and any women that doubt their own brilliance, Antia hails;

“You are enough, don’t be so hard on yourself, and don’t be afraid of how bloody marvellous you are”

To the entrepreneurs, she advises being smart about systems

Having described her as an inspiration for beauty entrepreneurs, she shares her experience and key learnings; “I’d tell beauty entrepreneurs to be true to yourself. That’s why I’ve changed my career so many times, it has to suit the stage where I am in my life. Start small but have your systems in place, that’s a really important thing. It’s very easy to get started and keep running but once you’re running there’s no stopping. Have decent systems in place and scale quickly.”

A chameleon in the working world, she is a real business marvel

Entrepreneurship is in Antia’s DNA; “I’ve had my own businesses for the last 25 years. What I do has evolved as I have evolved. I wrote books when my children were young. Before that I had a multi-channel retailer in the interiors world.”

Keeping up with the Kaushals

Family has always been, and always will be, the most important thing in Anita’s life;

“I first realised I wanted to get into beauty because I wanted to keep my heritage alive.”

“My father-in-law is an Ayavedic doctor, my grandmother is a Herbalist, I wasn’t getting any younger. I looked at this man who was 86, really fit and sprightly, and I thought – I want more of that. As I got into it, I realised that I could spend my days learning, educating and making a living, which sounded good to me.”

At Mauli Rituals, the customer really is the King or Queen

Keeping her customers at the heart of everything she does, Anita explains; “I absolutely love customer feedback, we’re working in a void otherwise. We need to be receptive to what they want.

“It’s a joy when they communicate with us. What we do is about very much education. I love when people feedback that our products or our tips have helped them in some way.”

The Mauli Rituals office is mostly female, but puts equality first

It’s clear that Anita uses her positive energy to create an office atmosphere where everyone is valued for what they bring to the table;

“We are a very small team, there’s only eight of us. Aside from my husband, we’re all women. That’s not by design, it’s just how it’s happened. It would be great to have some more male members of the team, it just so happens to be all women.”

“I love that all the women are different ages and stages of their lives. The younger ones tell me what the latest memes are, whilst the older ones are more sisterly. Our social media manager is studying yoga on the side, everybody brings their own feminine power to the team.”

It’s unsurprising that Anita has a close-knit group of friends

Sharing her love, time and wisdom with her friends every day, Anita has plenty of positive things to say about the female friendships in her life; “All my friends, I’ve made a lot of friends along the way, what I love about them is that they all have something about them that is perhaps missing in me.”

“So I have a friend that is very vibrant, I have another friend who is very wise, they all balance me, yin and yang.”

“The common denominator is that they are all unapologetically who they are, and I love that about them.”



Melissa

Melissa

Writer and expert

Life motto: 'There's no such thing as too many beauty products'


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