Deep Bajaj, founder of Sirona Hygiene, a Delhi-based indigenous femtech startup attempting to overcome the taboo around personal female hygiene, founded the company to discover answers to challenges his wife, mother, and millions of other Indian women encounter.
Women may use PeeBuddy (India's First Female Urination Device) to stand and pee/urinate in any unclean, public, hostile, or unsanitary restroom. Peebuddy is sold in top retailers such as Mahindra Babyoye, Dabur NewU, Religare, 24x7, Guardian, Health & Glow, Apollo, Medplus, Le Marche, and online portals like as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, Ebay, and others, and is recommended by the best physicians (for usage during pregnancy/arthritis).
Sirona has introduced a number of innovative products since its inception in 2015, including PeeBuddy (India's first Stand and Pee/female urination device), menstrual cups, washes and sterilisers for these cups, India's first herbal period pain relief patches, anti-chafing rash cream, coloured biodegradable sanitary pads, and oxo-degradable disposal bags.
A Personal Quest That Became a Professional Objective -
Before moving into the female hygiene sector, Deep had partnered his wife, Rashi, a couture carpet designer, in the business of handcrafted carpets. Running this firm while Rashi was in her third trimester of pregnancy had proven tough, especially while travelling for business meetings. It had gotten more difficult for her to leave the house.
Deep didn't come up with the concept for PeeBuddy, the stand and pee device, until 2013. Deep noted that although the guys had no trouble drinking whatever they wanted on a road trip from Delhi to Jaipur with four other couples, the ladies were restricting their intake due to the absence of clean bathrooms along the route. Even the most prominent cafes along the Delhi-Jaipur expressway lacked clean restrooms.
So, he created the original form of the product with a handful of buddies. In 2015, he founded Sirona Hygiene with the goal of addressing all unresolved personal and menstrual hygiene difficulties that women encounter.
Deep would often ask Rashi, when developing PeeBuddy, what additional challenges women have that aren't generally discussed. For example, when it came to severe period pain, which his wife experienced every month, bringing a hot water bottle to work was not an option. Pain relievers have unintended consequences. After consulting with a few of his friends, one of whom owns an Ayurvedic product manufacturing firm, and after significant research, he developed India's first herbal period pain treatment patch to address the issue.
Female Intimate Hygiene Industry Reimagined -
Deep noted early on while working in this field that, although other industries have seen substantial improvements in the previous several decades, there has been little to no progress in India when it comes to solutions for female hygiene.
In terms of the production process, Sirona's goal is to maintain it as sustainable as possible in terms of the ingredients and packaging materials used. PeeBuddy is an Indian-made cardboard funnel. Their herbal period pain treatment patches are developed in India using ayurveda unique compositions. Their intimate washes, as well as India's first natural rash cream for women's private areas, are all manufactured in India. They are relocating their manufacturing facilities from China to India to produce menstruation cups.
Market Expansion –
Sirona is an online-first brand that accepts orders from all around India. Every month, they dispatch around 1 lakh orders for their goods. Sirona was a bootstrapped enterprise for the first couple of years before raising a few minor rounds of finance and becoming successful. Today, they are supported by a number of awards, including the Government of India's 'National Entrepreneurship Award', the 'PhD Chamber of Commerce Award for Excellence', and the Economic Times 'Startup of the Year' (Social Enterprise), among others. They grew from two people to a workforce of over 100+ now.
Moving ahead, their goal is to come up with solutions for any intimate difficulties that do not currently have a remedy, ranging from puberty to menopause.