From Loss to Luxury: How Samreen Shaikh Turned a Bedroom Startup into Velvet Vanity Co.

In our latest Media Mohalla #EmpowerHer Exclusive, we speak with Samreen Shaikh, Co-Founder of Velvet Vanity Co., a Lucknow-based vegan, plant-powered beauty brand created with one simple belief – makeup should feel as good on your skin as it looks.

From building skin-friendly, everyday makeup for Indian skin tones to championing conscious beauty, Samreen shares the journey, vision and entrepreneurial thinking behind velvetvanityco.com.

She Talks about a particular kind of silence that settles over a house after it loses too much, too fast. She knows that silence intimately. she lost her father and both her younger brothers within a span of time, and almost overnight, the girl who used to sit in front of the mirror experimenting with kajal and lipstick had to become the person holding a family together.

She won’t pretend that transition was graceful. It wasn’t. she came from a small town where daughters are rarely raised to run anything, let alone a business. Independence wasn’t handed to her; it was something she had to build, quite literally, one sale at a time.

1 – Starting with What She Had: A Phone, a Contact List and a Love for Makeup.

I didn’t have capital. I didn’t have a business degree. What I had was a genuine, childhood-deep love for makeup, and a phone full of contacts like friends, cousins, neighbours, their friends. So, I started small: buying other brands’ products and reselling them to people I knew. No office, no team, no fancy branding. Just me, my phone, and a growing list of women who trusted me enough to order a lipstick or a foundation shade based on my word.

Looking back, that reselling phase wasn’t just a survival hustle. It was an education I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. I learned what women wanted from their makeup not what glossy ads told them to want. I learned which foundations broke Indian skin out within a week. I learned how many women were quietly avoiding daily makeup altogether because it left their skin worse than it found it. I heard the same complaint, again and again, in different words: “I love makeup, but it doesn’t love my skin back.”

2 – The Question That Changed Everything

Somewhere in the middle of packing orders and following up on payments, one question started repeating in my head: Why am I building someone else’s brand with my own hands? Why not build mine?

That question sat with me for a long time before it turned into a decision. Because building a brand from scratch, coming from where I come from, without a safety net, without family wealth, without industry connections and it felt almost irresponsible to even consider. But I’d already survived the hardest thing life could throw at me. A business idea, in comparison, felt like something I could fight for.

That’s how Velvet Vanity Co. was born not in a boardroom, but out of grief, grit, and a genuine desire to give women what I never had: makeup that respects their skin as much as it enhances their face.

3 – Building It Right, Not Fast

Once my partner and I decided to build our own brand instead of reselling other people’s, we made one non-negotiable decision early on: we would not launch until it was actually good  not just marketable.

We knew exactly what we wanted Velvet Vanity Co. to stand for:

• Vegan and plant-based formulations – no compromise on ingredients just to cut costs.
• Daily-wear friendly – makeup light enough that women could wear it every single day without their skin paying the price later.
• Skin-first, not just look-first – products that work with skincare instead of undoing it.
• Made for Indian skin tones and climate – something most international and even many Indian brands still get wrong.

To get this right, my partner travelled to China and South Korea two of the most advanced regions in the world for cosmetic formulation and skin-compatible technology to source ingredients and study formulations that could genuinely be adapted for Indian skin. That wasn’t a small trip; it meant time, cost, and a level of commitment most people wouldn’t put into an idea that was, at that stage, still just an idea. Formula after formula was tested, adjusted, and tested again, until it matched what we’d promised ourselves from day one: makeup that enhances beauty without demanding sacrifice from your skin.

Today, Velvet Vanity Co., based out of Lucknow, is built around that exact promise, a growing line of face, eye, and lip products, including a matte liquid foundation with SPF, a lightweight highlighter pen, a blush wand, and a mascara serum, all designed for the woman who wants to look enhanced, not masked, every single day.

4 – Why This Story Matters Beyond the Brand

I’m not sharing this because I want sympathy. I’m sharing it because I know I’m not the only woman who’s had to rebuild her entire life from an unimaginable loss, with no roadmap and no one to hand her the resources to start over.

If there’s one thing I want other women especially those from small towns, especially those who’ve been told to be “dependent,” “adjusting,” “quiet” to take from my story, it’s this: grief doesn’t have to be the end of your story. Sometimes, it’s the raw material you build your next one out of.

Velvet Vanity Co. is my proof of that. It’s a business built by a woman who had every reason to give up and chose, instead, to build something that would outlive the loss that started it.

We’re just getting started. And I couldn’t be more excited or more grateful  to be sharing this story with the Media Mohalla and Empower Her community, of women lifting other women, one story at a time