What Falak Sheth taught me about building a brand without noise

I meet a lot of founders who are trying to be seen. Falak Sheth is one of the few trying not to be.

He runs Sheth Brothers, the family business behind Kayam Churna, a name that sits in almost every chemist in the country. He also owns one of the largest sneaker collections in India. I expected a conversation about a legacy Ayurvedic brand. I left thinking about restraint, and about how much of it is a choice.

Here is what stayed with me.

The maker matters more than the product

Most people who inherit a name as recognised as Kayam Churna would stamp it on everything. Falak does the opposite. When he meets someone new, he says Sheth Brothers first, and lets Kayam come second.

His reasoning is simple. People trust the product but do not know who makes it. He wants the company to carry that recognition, so that every new thing they build starts from trust rather than from zero. It sounds obvious when he says it. It is not. It takes patience to grow the parent when the child is already famous, and most brands never manage it.

Simplicity is a decision, not a default

The name Kayam Churna means daily powder. You are meant to take it every day, and the name says exactly that. No cleverness, no layers. He kept coming back to this idea through the conversation. Keep the product simple. Keep the messaging simple. Keep your life simple.

I work with a lot of brands, and I watch most of them add complexity in the hope that it reads as sophistication. Falak does the reverse. His line at the end of our conversation was that if you move too fast you miss too many things, so you go step by step, one place at a time. For someone running a business this large, that is a surprising thing to hear. It is also the reason it still works.

He understands hype, and refuses to use it

This is the part I found most interesting. Falak knows the mechanics of hype better than almost anyone I have spoken to. He can explain drops, scarcity, resale, and collaborations in detail, because that is how the sneaker world works, and he has lived inside it for years.

And yet his own brand is the opposite of hype. Kayam is always available, always the same, always trusted. I asked whether he would ever borrow the drop model for the business. He would not. The image of that bottle is so fixed in people's minds that even a small change brings worried phone calls. He knows which rules apply to him and which do not, and he does not confuse the two. That discipline is rarer than knowledge.

The taboo was the opportunity

Kayam Churna sits in a category most brands avoid. Constipation is not something people discuss openly. Instead of treating that as a limit, Falak treated it as space. The campaign used humour, and it worked, and teenagers started sharing it. A subject people usually hide became something they repeated out loud.

The lesson I took is that the categories nobody wants to talk about often have the most room to move, because nobody else is trying.

To get away from digital, I become analog

The line I keep returning to is his simplest one. He is digital first at work, and analog by discipline at home. He wakes at half past five, plays badminton, goes home for lunch, and calls the whole routine a discipline. The rest of the family lives the same way. One walks, one rides, one plants trees.

When I asked what Bhavnagar gives him that the bigger cities cannot, he said peace, and he said it plainly, as a decision rather than a compromise. His grandfathers once cycled forty to fifty kilometres a day to sell the product, and came home from Bombay by flight after one ad changed everything. That story is the root of all of it. The calm is not the absence of ambition. It is what the ambition was for.

[Embed reel: From a bicycle to a flight]

What I am taking away

We are all being told to be louder, faster, and more visible. Falak is quietly proving that the opposite can win. Build the maker, not the product. Keep it simple on purpose. Know which rules are yours. And protect the peace that made the work possible in the first place.

If any of this stayed with you, the full conversation goes deeper.