Our story
A family,
and a recipe book.
Saatvik Herbs is 4 people in Kelwa, Palghar. We grow what we can, make everything by hand in small batches, and have been doing it for 25 years — long before any of it was a business.
Where it began
It started as something we made for ourselves
Neeta grew up around herbs. Her father taught her which plants did what, where to find them and how to prepare them, and she kept it — not as a career, just as something she knew. In 2001 she put that knowledge to use for the first time and made her first formulation, for our own family. That preparation, refined many times over the years since, is what we now sell as ArshHar.
Hair Jeevan came in 2006, and it came out of frustration. Neeta had been reading the backs of bottles in shops and not liking what she found there. So she made her own instead, from about ten ingredients. The version we sell today is the same recipe after 20 years of small adjustments — it has never been finished, exactly, and every batch is a chance to improve it.
For most of those years we made these things only for ourselves and for people who asked. Selling them properly is recent.
The family
Everyone has a job, and everyone helps with the rest
Grows and prepares
Deepak KuduDeepak keeps the garden and knows every plant in it. He decides when a herb is ready, picks it, dries it and prepares it — the whole way from a growing plant to something that can go into a batch. He also spends part of every day out on his bike telling people about what we make. He used to be too shy to start a conversation with a stranger. He is not any more, and watching that change has been one of the better things about this.
Formulates and answers
Neeta KuduNeeta wrote the recipes. She learned herbs from her father as a child and has been refining what she made from that ever since. She still makes the hair oil herself, batch by batch. She is also the voice on the other end of the phone: if you call, message or knock on the door, you are talking to her, and she is the one who follows up afterwards to ask how you got on.
Packs and protects
Anvi KuduAnvi decides how a parcel survives monsoon rain and a courier van, and what it feels like to open. In the early days she cut and folded the boxes herself. She still seals every bottle, wraps it, packs it and writes the note that goes in, on the grounds that the moment someone opens the box is our real first impression.
Everything with a screen
Apurv KaduApurv put the business online — the name, the branding, this website, the suppliers for what we cannot grow, and the shipping that means a parcel now reaches a PIN code we have never been to. He learned to write code to build this page. The rest of the family taught him that you can simply decide to learn a thing.
Those are the roles on paper. In practice nobody does their part alone — when a batch is being made, all 4 of us are on it.
How we make it
Small batches, because that is genuinely how much we can make
A batch of hair oil is 15 to 18 bottles. Not a strategy — that is the size of our largest vessel. We make one about once a week, or whenever we run out.
Nothing is harvested until we are ready to make a batch, so what goes in was on a plant a few days earlier rather than in a sack for a season. If a leaf or a stem looks wrong when it is picked, it is rejected — not set aside to think about, rejected. The test we use on everything is whether we would be happy for our own family to take it, which is not a slogan, because we do.
The herbs in Hair Jeevan — neem, curry leaf, henna, aloe vera, amla and hibiscus leaves — grow in our own garden. The oils and a few of the dry ingredients we buy in, from suppliers we have used for years. We are a small family and we cannot press our own sesame oil, and we would rather tell you that than imply otherwise.
What we will not tell you
We do not promise results
Our preparations are traditional herbal ones, made by hand. They are not medicines and they do not replace medical advice. Herbal preparations behave differently for different people, and anyone who tells you exactly how many days something will take is guessing.
We would rather answer a question honestly and lose the sale. If you are pregnant or nursing, managing a condition, or taking prescribed medication, please talk to a doctor first. And if you want to ask us something before you buy, ask — Neeta will pick up.