indē wild founder Diipa Büller-Khosla on building a community-first brand

Diipa Büller-Khosla: It was so long ago. I was just a university student in the UK when I first turned my personal Instagram into wanting to do more with it, and I used to take photos. I remember my mom used to have a clinic in Rotterdam, so I would take photos when I visited there, and then take photos in London. I guess in every big influencer’s life, there are a few viral moments, right? My first viral moment was my acne, where I showed for the first time how bad my skin was, that it was really bleeding, and that it wasn’t perfect. Back then, Instagram was about perfection, so when I did the opposite and showed this vulnerability, I remember my blog post crashed. I had this blog post about my entire journey of how I’d been lying and photoshopping my skin, and that whole thing crashed because of how much it resonated. That reality became its own IP, in a way, where we started doing this “real over perfect” thing.

This was really in the early days when I started sharing more real moments and vulnerable moments, and not just the perfect life of Instagram. And I think that was also a seed of the whole indē wild journey – because then I shared my skincare journey more, started sharing my hair care journey more, and started noticing that people really resonated with it. The combination of my mom’s dermatology background, as well as the Ayurvedic botanicals together, made me think, hey, I think there’s a hole in the market. By now, every beauty brand in the world has given me their products, but not a single one really connects to my identity. Why are we not doing more with that?

Diipa Büller-Khosla: From the get-go, because of being a creator, I know how it feels. Even something as simple as payments – there is a policy in indē wild where if we need to pay out a creator, we need to pay them out, because I know the struggle of how it’s been on the other side when brands just don’t respect you, don’t pay you. Then, of course, it’s the creator knowing their community best. I think it’s such a simple thing, but obviously, you need to let them speak to their community the way they want to speak to them, and not the way you want to script them. I’ve done so many brand partnerships where I’m basically just their puppet, telling you exactly what they want me to say, and it’s so unnatural. You notice that those posts don’t do well either. So I think really trusting the creator, trusting that they know their community best, is something that we really wanted to feel organic.

We also only work with creators who genuinely love us and genuinely like our products. We would never force it down somebody and be like, “Go promote it.” Because even our latest South Indian celebrity that we had over on Sunday, Anupama – she is one of the biggest South Indian celebrities right now, but she is an avid Champi (hair oil) user. When we connected with her manager, the manager fell off his chair, because he’s like, “Oh my God, this is her dream brand.” And that’s the only way it feels more organic and real. It’s such a no-brainer for me because I’ve been a creator, but if you’re a brand manager who has KPIs to achieve, and your boss is screaming down at you, then you do it in such a different way than when the entire philosophy of the company is creator-first, social-first, organic-first.

Diipa Büller-Khosla: We launched the brand during the pandemic, so the initial years were a lot of online events. But since we can go offline now, that’s something we really love doing. [If] it’s in New York, we’ll just take over a coffee shop for an afternoon and invite all our community members there to mingle with each other, even if I’m not there, or we’ll have an influencer host it. In Mumbai, we have a bunch of IPs. We call it the Champi Masterclass – the Champi events – where mom and I go to different cities and take over a beautiful location and talk about the story of the Champi, show how to use the product, and interact with our community members there.

Diipa Büller-Khosla: I don’t want to give all our trade secrets away! Focus groups are a very important part of that. It’s just really getting their opinion, really getting their buy-in. Some of these focus groups go on for two, three hours, where we’re just really digging deep into your what, your why, your how, your how much, and really all of those questions that really make us test things or confirm biases or not. So much of that is just asking them in detail what they want or what they like.

Diipa Büller-Khosla: I know. And the funny thing is, when an investor came onto our board and we told them how often we do these and how easy they are for us, they fell off their chairs. They were like, for one of our brands, it costs us like $5 million a year to do focus groups, and for you, it’s just a matter of posting it on your stories, and the next day people just show up to your office, and you’re doing it with 50 people. It’s crazy. “Community” is such a buzzword these days – everybody wants it, but people forget it’s taken 10 years, and these people genuinely care because you care. It’s that care and that trust that you can’t put a metric or a dollar amount on.

Diipa Büller-Khosla: Honestly, that particular moment wasn’t strategic in any way – it was just a bunch of us doing what we do. Our social team and our influencer team brought these girls together, girls we’d worked with a million times already, who love the brand and are just so “us”, you know. So for us, it was nothing more than taking the girls we love to an amazing Tyla concert and showing the world what indē wild is and who our community is. The discourse it sparked online, and the insane virality it got, was all super shocking to us – because I’m like, wait, we’re still talking about the fact that you guys are shocked this new India exists, and that there are girls like this in India who exist and can dress this way? I think it only confirmed our conviction even more that this brand needs to go global, that we need to change the narrative about Indian women, about India, about who we are, the kind of products we make, and the kind of country we come from. There’s so much to share here, especially with South Asians being among the highest-earning people in the US, in the UK, all over the world. Like, come on, guys – are we really still thinking we’re that backward? So yeah, it was a really insane moment for us, but it only strengthened our conviction.

Diipa Büller-Khosla: It’s changing very rapidly. So whatever your playbook was last quarter, you can throw it out – it’s not going to work. You just have to really be online; there’s no other way. I’m a student of psychology, and I really try to analyse and study it all the time. And I believe there’s definitely something to it – what makes a moment go viral or not, I’m sure there’s a formulaic thing behind it – but from our perspective, I honestly feel like just being on the pulse constantly, understanding it, navigating it, evolving with it, is something that people should do, and agencies should do. I don’t think we should ever get complacent and think, “This is the formula, and that’s it now.” Especially for people who want to sustain their journey long term. What happens with influencers or agencies is they all go up and then go down, because at one moment they were really good at that thing, but then the algorithm moves on … like, say, when it suddenly went from photo to short-form video, short-form to long-form, long-form to talking. You have to keep evolving with the times, and put your foot in the next thing before it happens.