WOW STORY OF THE DAY: She Left Renee Cosmetics, Travelled the World, and Built India's First Biomimicry Skincare Brand.

The Origin — A Founding Member Who Walked Away to Build Something Real

• Nupur Jatinkumar Thakkar's path to founding Fugeno is itself a story of uncommon curiosity. Her career is a mosaic rather than a straight line: engineering, design, law, makeup artistry, construction, and beauty. She joined Renee Cosmetics as one of its founding members, helping build workflows, connect vendors, and market products from the ground up across three formative years.
• From there she moved into operations at WOO Distilleries, working on transportation and logistics. Across every role, she was building a rare combination: deep industry knowledge in beauty and cosmetics, operational rigour from sectors with no margin for error, and the pattern-recognition of someone who had seen how consumer brands actually scale from the inside.
• But the defining insight came not from a boardroom. It came from travel.
• During visits to Sri Lanka and Indonesia, Nupur observed something that stopped her: entire communities with deeply embedded, generation-old skincare rituals built around plants and natural processes. Coconut preparations. Botanical oils. Clays. Remedies with no brand, no packaging, and no marketing budget, yet trusted completely because they worked.
• "In India, we already have a lot of time-tested home remedies. But because they lack science, people doubt them. I aimed to make use of biomimicry and refine these home remedies into skincare products that give actual results without any trace of potential harm," Nupur shares.

She came home and started building. Fugeno was officially founded in January 2024.

 Future Meets Genome, Tradition Meets Science

• The name Fugeno is itself the founding philosophy compressed into a single word: Future and Genome. What lies ahead, built on what is already within us.
• Biomimicry, as defined by The Biomimicry Institute, is the practice of learning from and mimicking the strategies used by living organisms to solve challenges. Fugeno applies this directly to skincare. The skin's barrier function is supported through natural lipid complexes. Hydration systems are inspired by how plants retain water in harsh environments. Anti-inflammatory effects are modelled on compounds that mirror the body's own healing signals.
• The products reflect this philosophy with complete clarity. The Potato Bright Under Eye Mask draws from one of India's oldest home remedies. The Lavender Body Juice uses botanical actives in a format built for daily use. The Cinnamon Spice Lip Plumper takes a kitchen staple and refines it with science. The Multan Face Essential brings the heritage of multani mitti into a clinically considered format. Every product blends traditional ingredients with modern science-backed actives like niacinamide and salicylic acid to address real skin concerns without disrupting the skin's natural biology.
• The gender-neutral positioning is equally deliberate. In an industry that has spent decades dividing skincare into male and female categories, Fugeno treats skin as skin, requiring support rather than labels.
• "We're here to systematically dismantle beauty standards that have been set for ages. If you have dark spots, our products will help lighten them. But we don't want to do anything for your freckles. They're beautiful," Nupur says.

Scale, Recognition and Real-World Impact

• Fugeno launched its products on Amazon and its own website in mid-2024, completing its R&D, trials, certifications, and regulatory compliances between January and July 2024. The brand is currently available on Amazon, Myntra, Blinkit in Gujarat, and Smytten. It has a studio store in Ahmedabad and physical retail presence in Noida and Gurgaon. Fugeno has been recognised in Forbes India's DGEMS 200, a recognition of India's most distinctive emerging brands. Nupur Thakkar runs Fugeno as Fugeno Care OPC Private Limited, a one-person company, and remains directly involved in product development, customer feedback, and every aspect of operations.
• The brand targets Gen Z, millennials, and Gen Alpha aged between 23 and 45, the precise demographic that is rejecting unrealistic beauty standards and demanding transparency, inclusivity, and science-backed formulations in equal measure.

The Business Lesson — The Answers to Tomorrow's Problems Are Often Hidden in Yesterday's Kitchens

• The sharpest lesson from Fugeno's story is this: the most powerful innovations are sometimes recoveries rather than inventions.
• India did not lack effective skincare knowledge. It lacked the framework, the scientific validation, and the brand voice to make that knowledge credible to a modern consumer bombarded by marketing that systematically undermined their trust in what they already had.
• Nupur built that bridge. Not by rejecting tradition, and not by abandoning science, but by placing them in a genuine partnership with each other.
• "Skincare should make you feel supported," she says. That single sentence contains everything Fugeno stands for: a brand built on respect for the skin's own intelligence, for India's heritage, and for the consumer who deserves both at once.
• She left a founding role at one of India's fastest-growing beauty brands, crossed continents to observe communities that never stopped trusting nature, and built a brand whose name means the future is already written in your biology.
• Fugeno. Future and Genome. Everything you need was already inside you.

Sources: StartupPedia, Gujpreneur, InvestUp Media, Fugeno Official Instagram