MomentM, an Ayurvedic-inspired brand created to streamline consumers’ wellness routines, has launched with four supplements formulated to work together.
The supplements priced from $40 to $80 sit within three collections: Mind, Body and Vitality. Calm, a gummy supplement with shankhapushpi and rhodiola, is in Mind; Equilibrium, a fennel, amla and pre- pro- and postbiotic gut health capsule, is in Body; and Revitalize, a skincare capsule with ceramosides, hyaluronic acid and phytoceramides, and collagen powder Synthesis are in Vitality. The products are available on Amazon and MomentM’s website. Retailers like Target are goals down the line.
Marksans, a Mumbai-based pharmaceutical company that generated roughly $80 million last year, is backing MomentM. It was started a quarter century ago by Mark Saldanha, father of MomentM founder Marise Ann Saldanha, a former associate brand manager at Unilever for Dove Skin Cleansing. MomentM cost $3 million to bring it to life. Marise Ann Saldanha’s future plans include expanding MomentM’s assortment and building out a brand portfolio across different beauty categories.
After growing up in Mumbai where everything down to her daily dose of vitamins was controlled by her parents, Saldanha reveled in the autonomy she had to build her own wellness rituals when she moved in 2018 to California for undergraduate education at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. That revelry, however, promptly turned to confusion.
“I quickly felt so overwhelmed with the amount of options, what was worth it, what was not,” she recalls. “There were so many trends and opinions that I didn’t know where to begin or even what to use.”
Saldanha got caught in a cycle of trying and abandoning products, swayed by fleeting trends, influencer-hyped brands and marketing promises. Once she arrived in New York City post-graduation, her medicine cabinet was brimming with supplements, many that were left unopened and expired. Laying in bed one night with a stomach ache from her chaotic ingestible program, Saldanha says she thought, “I should have never started this journey in the first place.”
Her wellness fail was the spark for MomentM and its mission to simplify people’s wellness regimens. Saldanha’s father was the first person she shared her vision with. He responded with cautious optimism. “He said to me, ‘I’ll be honest with you, it takes nerves of steel to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone is cut out for it. You need to be ready for anything and everything,’” she recalls. “He also said, ‘The joy of creation is something that’s inexplicable.’ And that’s really what stuck with me.”
“There were so many trends and opinions that I didn’t know where to begin or even what to use.”
Marksans isn’t only supporting the brand financially. MomentM taps the company’s regulatory, ingredient and product testing expertise. It took three years for the brand to be ready for the market and the lengthy process was due to rigorous quality control.
“Being backed by a pharmaceutical company, we invest a lot in making sure that our products are extremely stable and viable when they hit shelves,” says Saldanha. “This helped us gain a competitive advantage and stay grounded in what really matters, which is creating products that are genuinely effective, trustworthy and made with care.”
MomentM is manufactured by a contract manufacturer in California and has faced manufacturer pushback. Saldanha says, “They’ve said, ‘You’re spending too much time and resources to launch. You’re never going to launch at this rate. All the other people that we work with, they’re pushing products out in four months.’”
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