tasting note no. 15

Fix My Curls - Anshita Mehrotra

a hair brand that took the word everyone used as an insult and made it the promise.

Anshita Mehrotra

origin.

 it started in 2019, begun by anshita mehrotra at nineteen, home in india on a break from a journalism degree. she had been in vancouver, where curly hair came with a shelf of products and a community, and came back to find india made nothing clean, affordable or effective for it. people were improvising with mayonnaise and men's gel, in a country that quietly treats curls as a problem to be straightened. so she started a brand to argue the exact opposite.

branding. the whole thing lives inside one flipped word. "fix" is what the world says when it wants you to flatten your hair, and she turned it to mean mend, not correct. the voice is warm, first person and a little defiant, a clapback in lowercase. the look grew from scrappy balcony photos into a confident 2025 system, a refined logo that draws the natural s shape a curl always keeps, and a colour coded range you can read at a glance.

crafting. the products are the craft, free of sulphates and silicones, balanced carefully for protein and moisture, and formulated for indian weather and the fact that a curl in the south is not a curl in the east. it arrives as a clear routine of steps so a beginner is never lost, which turns a confusing category into something you can actually follow at home.

marketing. it was built online first and community first, led by the founder telling her own story on instagram before there was any budget. today it sells across more than a dozen indian marketplaces and ten countries abroad, backed by amazon's smbhav fund, with its own event IP, curl convention, and teaching tools like curl quizzes that sell while they educate. revenue went from roughly 1.2 crore in year one to about 25 crore in a single year.

the highlight. the 2025 rebrand, because that is where most homegrown brands lose their nerve and start copying a clean western label. fix my curls did the opposite, keeping the clapback and simply letting its appearance grow up to match what it had been delivering for six years.

the take. my theory is that the strongest brands rest on one reframed word, and this is the cleanest indian example i have seen. it did not invent curl products, it invented permission, moving the whole conversation from what is wrong with your hair to what was wrong with the advice. the bottles are good, but the reframing is the real product, and people gather around being told the thing they hid was never the problem.