Akshina Jindal, a software developer at Goldman Sachs, had decided about a year and a half into her new job that she wanted to leave and build something of her own. With the plan to build a tech startup or a business around sustainability, Jindal, returned home to Chandigarh. A chance exposure to a contract cosmetics manufacturing unit changed her plans and pushed her towards the cosmetics industry.
“That stint of like three, four months actually taught me how the cosmetic industry in India works. The experience gave me an understanding of how brands develop formulations and outsource manufacturing," recounts Jindal, Founder, Bubble Me, while speaking to IMPACT. Magnesium was still nowhere a part of the plan. “Bubble Me was conceived as a bath-care and fragrance-focused brand. It was supposed to be an Indian version of the Bath & Body works that addresses the chemical formulations suited for Indian skin and price parity between the US and India.”
Bubble Me was launched in June 2024 with five products including shower gels, body mists and bath salts, in Panchkula, Haryana. While Jindal and her team placed their bets on the shower gels and body mists, formulated around aromatherapy, the product that grabbed the limelight came as a surprise to them. “We didn't get traction for any of our product except the bath salts, which was something which we didn't even anticipate,” she says.
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Instead of treating the product’s performance as an isolated success, Jindal’s team began studying why consumers were buying it and what they were saying about it. “We started hearing back from ours customers about how they were having sleep issues, and now they could sleep better; they were recovering because of the salts,” Jindal says.
“That feedback led Bubble Me to look beyond fragrance and bath care and into magnesium,” she further mentions. Education consequently became central to both the brand proposition and its marketing. Rather than simply selling bath salts, Bubble Me began explaining how to use them, the different forms of magnesium and their benefits. She adds that consumers are guided to soak their feet in a bucket of water with the bath salts added, especially because that is a practice Indians can relate to.
The marketing strategy has been built across multiple touchpoints. In its early phase, the brand relied on performance marketing, particularly Meta and Instagram, while pop-ups and gifting to friends and family helped generate its first customers and reviews. Amazon also became an important acquisition and discovery platform, with Jindal saying the brand’s salts reached the top 10 rankings within two months of being listed.
But paid advertising was only one part of the strategy. Founder-led communication became particularly important as the brand attempted to build trust around a category that required consumer education. “Initially, influencer marketing didn't work. Founder-based content worked more because I think there was more trust associated with it,” she says.
Podcasts also became part of the marketing mix. “We did many podcasts. We use them in our marketing strategy so that people trust our products,” Jindal says. The approach allowed BubbleMe to use longer-form conversations to explain the science and rationale behind its products rather than relying solely on short-form advertising.
The brand’s appearance on Shark Tank India added another layer of visibility and credibility. But for Jindal, Shark Tank was not a substitute for marketing. “It's not like the episode gets aired and your sales instantly double or triple,” she says. Instead, she believes brands need to actively amplify the visibility they receive and be prepared to handle the resulting increase in demand.
That philosophy extends to BubbleMe’s broader approach: use advertising to create discovery, content to build trust and education to create understanding. The brand now categorises its proposition around four areas — stress, sleep, recovery, and head comfort — allowing it to communicate magnesium through specific consumer needs rather than as an abstract wellness ingredient.
Today, BubbleMe is expanding beyond its original topical products into supplements, while entering pharmacies as an initial retail channel. Yet the larger ambition remains centred on education. “We want to be an education-first brand for magnesium wellness,” Jindal says. The brand calls this mission ‘Har Ghar Magnesium Yojana’, with the stated aim of helping consumers understand magnesium, its role and the different ways of meeting their requirements. In that sense, BubbleMe’s biggest leap was not simply from bath care to magnesium. It was from selling a product to building awareness around a category — with consumer feedback becoming the foundation, and education becoming the marketing strategy.
