'Women's Hair Loss Was Invisible to the Entire Industry': Why Saloni Anand Built Traya to Fix What No One Else Would

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching someone you love suffer whilst the people who are supposed to help them keep getting it wrong. For Saloni Anand, that frustration didn't stay private. It became Traya.

It started with her husband, Altaf. He was running a startup, skipping meals, sleeping too little, and slowly falling apart. His thyroid went haywire. His uric acid spiked. He gained weight. And then, fast enough to be frightening, his hair began to fall out. They tried everything, dermatologists, Ayurvedic remedies, expensive clinics, chemical treatments. Each one poked at one corner of the problem and ignored the rest.

This is part of our 'FounderHer' series, where we spotlight inspiring women entrepreneurs and their unique journeys. If you are a woman founder, apply for our flagship 'Womenpreneur Awards' 2026 and 'Nomination Form Here'.

"The market wasn't connecting what was happening inside his body to what was happening on his scalp," Saloni says.

When a combined approach, Ayurveda, dermatology, and nutrition working together, finally gave Altaf his hair back, Saloni didn't immediately think about launching a business. Her first thought was simpler and more damning: ‘why isn't anyone already doing this?’

They ran one ad. Fifty-five strangers signed up. Thirty-six of them saw real results. That was enough. Traya was no longer a personal experiment. It was a company.

Selling Truth in an Industry Built on Hype

The hair care market Saloni walked into in 2019 was loud and largely dishonest. Shampoos promised to reduce hair fall by 99%. Oils came with celebrity endorsements from people who had almost certainly never used them. Every shelf in every pharmacy told consumers that the solution to hair loss was simple, fast, and sitting right there next to the conditioner.

Saloni refused to play that game.

"In health, trust isn't bought; it's earned through results," she says, and she meant it literally. For the first two and a half years, Traya grew almost entirely on word of mouth. No heavy ad spends. No influencer deals. Just real customers who got real results and told their friends.

It was, by her own admission, terrifying. Watching competitors spend crores on celebrity campaigns whilst you sit quietly betting on outcomes takes nerve. Every month someone on the team would ask whether they should be louder. She held the line every time.

When Traya eventually brought on Rajkummar Rao and Neena Gupta as faces of the brand, the foundation was already solid. "They simply helped more people find us," she says. "The trust was already there."

Today, Traya has over 1.2 million customers, a clinical study published in a peer-reviewed journal, and a repeat customer rate of 80% after month two. That last number says everything about what Indian consumers actually want and how badly the market has been failing them.

"Indian consumers are not disloyal," Saloni says bluntly. "They're just underserved."

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Saloni Anand (@saloni.anand_)

The Problem Nobody Was Willing to Name

But the part of Traya's story that hits hardest isn't the growth numbers. It's what Saloni uncovered when she looked more closely at women.

For decades, the hair loss industry built itself around men. The Norwood Scale, the standard tool used to measure hair loss, was designed for male pattern baldness. The landmark minoxidil studies used predominantly male participants. The marketing showed men staring at their hairlines. Women, meanwhile, were handed the same products and told to get on with it.

"For the longest time, it wasn't even a footnote," Saloni says. "It was invisible."

This invisibility had real consequences. Women experiencing hair loss linked to PCOS, postpartum changes, or menopause were being offered solutions designed for a completely different biological reality. The triggers are different. The patterns are different. The emotional weight is different. Handing someone the wrong tool and calling it a solution isn't care, it's dismissal.

When Saloni's team studied the psychological impact of hair loss on young people, they found women and men aged 25 to 30 withdrawing from social life, skipping gatherings, avoiding photographs, losing confidence in rooms they used to own. The pain was real and widespread. The industry's response was to look the other way.

That changed for Traya in 2023, when they launched the Santulan range, trademarked formulations built specifically around what happens inside a woman's body at different life stages. Not marketing labels dressed up as science. Actual science, built for actual problems.

ALSO READ- 'Is It Normal for Sex to Hurt?' Why Divya Balaji Kamekar Built 'Pinky Promise' Around the Questions India Is Too Shy to Ask

"If we don't build solutions that take women's hair loss seriously," Saloni says, "nobody else in this industry will."

Building a Company Without Losing Yourself

What makes Saloni's story particularly striking is that she built all of this without a blueprint. She grew up in Vapi, Gujarat, in a service-class family where the plan was straightforward: study hard, get a secure job, don't take unnecessary risks. Her engineering degree and MBA gave her tools. Neither gave her what she actually needed, the ability to live with uncertainty and keep going anyway.

That came from an unlikely source: her mother-in-law, who came from a long line of entrepreneurs and operated on what Saloni affectionately calls ‘foolish optimism.’ When everyone around the couple shrugged and said ‘yeh toh nahi ho payega’, this can't be done, her mother-in-law never flinched. She backed them before there was any proof that they deserved to be backed.

"Belief doesn't have to understand your business plan," Saloni says. "It just has to trust you."

She carried that energy into how she built her team. Today, half of Traya's 400-plus employees are women, not because of a gender quota, but because of a deliberate culture. Women at Traya run marketing, medical, product innovation, and customer experience. These are P&L-owning roles, not token positions dressed up as leadership.

Saloni had two children whilst growing the company. She made sure that never became something to apologise for, because if the co-founder is made to feel guilty about being a mother, every woman watching learns exactly what kind of place it is.

"The number alone isn't the finish line," she says of the 50:50 split. "What happens inside that number every single day is what actually matters."

There is a phrase Saloni returns to often: ‘fall in love with the problem, not the solution.’ It sounds like startup advice, but for her it is something more personal than that. The problem wasn't a gap she spotted in a spreadsheet. It was something that upended her husband's confidence, something that millions of women were quietly enduring, something that an entire industry had decided wasn't worth solving properly.

ALSO READ- 'We Didn’t Pitch an Idea, We Built a Craft Economy': How Yosha Gupta Locked a Rare 4-Shark Deal on Shark Tank

She decided it was. And then she went and fixed it.

Keep reading Herzindagi for more such stories.