On Her Own Terms: Natasha Tuli’s Journey of Entrepreneurship and Empowerment

“You can design your own life,” says Natasha Tuli, co-founder and CEO of Soulflower. “And you don’t necessarily have to grow up in the conventional sense.”   

Coming from most people, that would read as a LinkedIn caption. Coming from Tuli, it is almost a confession — of who she refused to become, and what it cost her to refuse. She grew up in one of Bollywood’s most recognisable families, in a world that had already decided what her life should look like. She built a natural beauty brand from a kitchen, survived a brain haemorrhage that left her bald, and turned her recovery oil into one of the top-ranked hair oils on Amazon. She chose not to have children. Instead, she shares her home and office with multiple rescued dogs, cats and birds.

The through-line in all of it — the choices, the product, the company — is that she kept designing. Not following a plan, but designing: sketching it out, adjusting, starting again.   

Soulflower, which Tuli co-founded with Amit Sarda in 2001, today ranks among the top hair oil brands on Amazon and quick commerce platforms — competing with legacy FMCG giants on velocity and loyalty. The company reported ₹63.9 crore in revenue for FY25, up 57% year-on-year, and has attracted investment from Wipro Consumer Care for an undisclosed amount. Even so, its share of the fast-growing new-age haircare market remains smaller than that of digital-first brands such as Inde Wild and Pilgrim.  

Natasha Tuli grew up in a family that did not expect women to work. Her grandfather’s family had migrated from Sialkot during Partition, leaving everything behind and starting over in India. From that beginning, they built something remarkable: her uncle, Rajendra Kumar, became one of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars of the 1960s. Sanjay Dutt and Kumar Gaurav are her cousins. Her father produced films.  

It was a life of comfort and glamour — and a very clear script for women. Get married well. Live well. The ceiling was gilded, but it was still a ceiling.   

Tuli, who grew up chubby, bespectacled and profoundly introverted, did not fit the frame. While her peers navigated drawing rooms and film premieres, she was outside catching stray cats, sitting in the garden, or climbing trees. “You would usually find me outside,” she recalls, with no apparent regret. “I loved spending time in nature and with animals.”   

She still has seven or eight dogs at home, most of them rescues. The instinct to take something broken or abandoned and give it a home has not diminished with age or success.   

What she took from that quiet, observational childhood was not bitterness about the expectations placed on her, but a skill: the ability to read people. “When you observe more than you speak, you begin to understand what people want, what they need — sometimes even before they say it,” she says. “That ability has helped me immensely while building products.”   

She chose architecture over convention. As a landscape architect, her interest in botanicals deepened. Her frustration with salons — sitting still for two hours, she says, “felt like torture” — planted the first seed of what would become Soulflower. She began experimenting in her kitchen on weekends. No background in chemistry. No formal training in formulations. Just curiosity, books and small batches.  

“Interestingly, because I didn’t know much about preservatives or synthetic ingredients, most of the early products were extremely natural,” she says, almost amused by the irony. “That eventually became one of our biggest strengths.”   

In 2001, she and Amit Sarda — whose family had been in retail for over a century — launched Soulflower as an aromatherapy brand. Tuli made the products. Sarda knew how to move them. It was a clean division of labour between two people who understood that building something good was only half the battle.  

Then, in 2013, her body stopped the story. Tuli, a marathon runner at the time, had suffered a head injury that led to internal bleeding. A brain haemorrhage. Surgery followed. Her head was shaved completely.   

She does not dwell on it with drama. She tells it the way someone tells a story they have made peace with. But the weight of it is there — in the pause before she describes what came next.   

Recovery, for Tuli, looked like this: she began applying oils she had blended herself from the essential oils she had spent years working with. Slowly, her hair began to grow back. Faster than expected. Her salon noticed before she thought to mention it.  

“They asked what I was using,” she says. “That’s when we realised there could be an opportunity.”   

The oil was bottled. It was called, simply, Healthy Hair Oil. It is now, according to Nielsen data, among the top-ranked hair oils on Amazon and quick commerce — a product born not in a laboratory or a marketing meeting, but in the aftermath of a medical crisis, in a woman’s private effort to heal.  

The haemorrhage changed something beyond the product portfolio. “It made me realise that life is actually very short,” she says. “So if you want to try something, try it. Even if you fail, at least you tried.” It is the kind of thing people say, but she had earned the right to mean it.  

Ask Tuli about women in business and she is careful, perhaps deliberately, not to give you the answer you expect.   

She believes in gender parity at the factory floor — Soulflower aims for at least 50 per cent women in its manufacturing workforce, including tribal women in Banswara, Rajasthan, where many of its oils are produced. But she also says: “Once you are in a professional environment, the expectations remain the same for everyone.” Equality, in her framing, is not a lowering of bars — it is a removal of obstacles.   

She is equally direct about the choices she made for herself. She decided not to have children. Not because the brand demanded it, but because she wanted to dedicate her life to her work, her animals and her causes. She says it without apology and without elaboration.   

“You cannot make everyone happy all the time,” she says. “At some point you have to choose the life you want.”  

 For a woman who grew up in a family where the prescribed life was marriage and comfort, that sentence carries more than it lets on.   

Soulflower’s growth philosophy mirrors its founder’s temperament. Tuli is wary of the fast-scaling startup model — brands that grow quickly and hollow out. She prefers what she calls the “oak tree approach”: slower growth, deep roots.  

Twenty-four years in, the brand is still founder-led, still making its oils in tribal communities in Rajasthan, still anchored in naturals at a time when the category has become both mainstream and crowded. Tuli herself remains the R&D; department — a formulator who learned by doing, not by degree.   

“One lesson from this journey is that you don’t have to know everything before starting,” she says. “I had no background in formulation or manufacturing. Yet today I’ve been running factories for over two decades.” Entrepreneurship, she is quick to add, is not tidy. Criticism, mistakes, setbacks — she encounters them almost every day.   

Her mechanism for moving through them is a question: “Okay, this happened. Now what can we do next?” It is not motivational-poster wisdom. It is the pragmatism of someone who has had to restart from bald.  

The sketch pad is still in her cabin. The dogs are still at home. Somewhere in Banswara, a tribal woman is pressing oil from seeds that will eventually reach a consumer who knows nothing of any of this — of the Bollywood family, the silent child in the garden, the surgery, the hair growing back.  

 That distance between origin and product is where most brand stories live. Natasha Tuli’s version is unusual because the origin is not incidental to the product — it is the product. The hair oil exists because she needed it. The brand exists because she needed to build something that was hers.   

She designed her own life. It turns out a lot of people wanted what she was making.