“Empathy & Care” –is something that’s easily forgotten in business, as it isn’t a metric that can be tracked on a financial statement. At the core of it, it’s about truly understanding your customer’s needs and fulfilling them with the best experience they can imagine.

Unfortunately, as capital market forces would have it, duopolies don’t do well with empathy and care for customers. The Indian women’s wellness space is dominated by two of the world’s largest FMCG companies owning north of 75% market share. This focus on increasing market share and distribution leaves little incentive to really connect with customers. The end result is a decades old, non-innovative, subpar experience for nearly half the human population at a time when women need that empathy the most

Nua saw that opportunity 4 years ago. A commoditized product (sanitary pads) sold through an uncomfortable experience (over the counter at a kirana store) by complacent incumbents who advertise their products as technical absorbents. When we spell it out now, something does seem broken. What was missing, was the care to support every woman with her unique needs. And the empathy to broaden our understanding of this space and look at it as all round women’s wellness, not just once a month.

Nua is revolutionizing the industry with an experience fit for the 21^st century. The category, by its very nature, lends itself perfectly to subscription. So, when Nua introduced its customizable pack of sanitary pads on subscription, women flocked to it. Women could now order exactly what they needed and Nua would deliver it to them every month without intervention. The customer experience went from embarrassing encounters at retail stores wrapped in black plastic bags to automated delivery at their doorstep customized as per their needs. And the results are tangible – 75% of Nua’s customers are subscribers and more than 60% of them stay on for 12 months or more. This has propelled Nua’s 500% growth in the last 12 months despite the challenges of the pandemic.

But all this “empathy” doesn’t come easy. This is where the “care” part of the equation adds up. Nua’s 250K strong community is the backbone for these insights. Nua engages with women across social media platforms trying to understand what they really want. Their ever-growing community engages on topics from menstruation to mental health to even career advise through meaningful conversations. Slowly and steadily, Nua’s community has become a safe space for women to share their thoughts and have their personal questions answered. Having these women convert to customers would be incidental, but the true nature of community is the care for women’s matters that Nua embodies.

And it is from this care, Nua has been able to understand the true needs of women and offer a broad range of products across all wellness categories. Something the large incumbents chose not to for decades. Heat patches for cramps, panty liners, intimate washes, acne patches, multivitamin drinks, period kits are just some of the products Nua understood are the need of the hour for women.

Companies can never buy such insights, only brands with empathy can understand them