Splitsvilla winner and The Traitors 2 contestant Soundous Moufakir did not set out to create just another beauty brand. The idea for MoroMaa came from something much more personal: missing the Moroccan beauty rituals and ingredients she had grown up with after moving away from Europe and, eventually, to Asia. That gap became the starting point for MoroMaa, the beauty, lifestyle and body care brand she launched in India on June 27, 2026. In its first few months, the brand has already sold out two products and raised ₹1.5 crore from Aviral Bhatnagar of AJ VC for a 9 percent equity stake.
Soundous, who has an MBA in Finance and a career in entertainment, is now balancing two very different worlds as MoroMaa’s founder and CEO. Her larger plan is to introduce what she calls “M Beauty”, or Moroccan Beauty, to Indian consumers.
Building a brand around Moroccan beauty
For Soundous, MoroMaa began with a problem she was personally facing. After moving to Asia, she found it increasingly difficult to get access to the Moroccan ingredients and beauty products she had grown up using. Even when she found them, she was not always convinced about their authenticity.
“The idea came when I used to live in France, which is just like one hour far from Morocco. We used to have access to those Moroccan beauty rituals and authentic ingredients, but now that I completely shifted to Asia, which is like another continent very far from North Africa, I didn’t have access to those ingredients. I did through many channels, many other brands, but the authenticity was never there because I grew up using these ingredients. I can tell by the colour, by the smell, if the argan oil is authentic or it’s diluted. And sometimes, even though I used to pay a lot of money to get the right quality, I still didn’t get my hand on the right product,” she tells Hindustan Times in an interview.
The idea also gave Soundous a chance to bring together her cultural background and business education. “Then came the idea to also bring my identity, put my MBA in Finance into work, and that’s how the whole MoroMaa was created. I’m not competing with anyone because the idea of creating MoroMaa is to establish and create the M Beauty, which is the Moroccan Beauty, and that’s the white space that actually exists, which nobody is filling. You don’t have, and that’s also something that cannot be copied, which is the storytelling of the founder,” she adds.
For her, that knowledge is a major part of what the brand brings to the table. “I don’t think anyone is coming from Morocco and has grown up using those ingredients and has been immersed into the Hamam rituals and now is bringing that culture and that identity to India. You need to spend a lot of years and a lot of months and months and months in Morocco to understand what are the right ingredients and not just what are the right ingredients. That expertise of when you see an ingredient, you understand which seed is it, authentic, not authentic. When you look at the argan oil, there are different seeds, there are different ways of pressing it, and one leads to an oil that is actually cosmetic use, and one leads to an oil which is actually for beverage. So that expertise needs a lot of time and you cannot get it very easily. So that’s what we bring as an IP and as a differentiation from other brands,” she adds.
Soundous speaks about the products
One of MoroMaa’s products reflects that approach through a mix of traditional Moroccan ingredients. “It has 5 percent of argan oil, authentic ones. It’s made out of 3.5 percent of ghassoul clay. It has 2 percent of neroli oil, and then it has brown sugar. So this is a very typical specific formulation that acts like a scrub, and at the same time acts like a mask and acts like a moisturiser, and it’s made for all skin types,” Soundous says.
Argan oil, in particular, is central to Moroccan beauty and to the brand. “Argan is that kind of gold oil that penetrates three layers deep into your skin. So, not like you’re using coconut oil on your skin and your skin gets oily. Once you put argan oil, if you want to do a test, you put the authentic one, not the diluted one. If you put it, within like a minute, your skin will not feel oily because it really gets absorbed by the skin,” she explains.
When selling out becomes a problem
While selling out products may look like an obvious success for a young brand, Soundous says it also creates a very real operational challenge. “The supply chain is a little bit complicated in terms of importing the right ingredient because that comes from Morocco. And when you look at my formulation, there is a huge amount of the neem powder, of the Moroccan clay, of the argan oil, which is in that formulation, more than like 40 percent, which makes the inventory management very hard,” she says.
The process involves coordinating several moving parts at the same time. “First I need to check how much we are selling, then calculate my end inventory date, and then accordingly get a few ingredients from Morocco, like the hero ingredients, then get ingredients from India, then they reach the manufacturer. Then we start manufacturing, and at the same time, I have to manage the label, the production of the label, of the packaging and all of that. So it’s like many manufacturers, many vendors working together around the clock so we can get the products at the right times,” she adds.
That becomes even harder when demand suddenly jumps. “It’s very difficult to monitor this operational aspect. It needs to be done daily because sometimes you never know when people can order a lot of products. Sometimes I just wake up and because word of mouth has reached that this product is good, then the next day, you are out of stock. But then, which is like good news, it’s commercially fun to say, ‘Hey guys, we are out of stock,’ but actually it fires back at the end internally because you are losing money, you’re losing customers that are ready to purchase your product, but you are not ready to meet their demand,” Soundous says.
The early investment in MoroMaa
Soundous also approaches MoroMaa with the mindset of someone who understands the investment side of a business. Before backing a company, she says investors need to look at the problem it is trying to solve and whether it is entering an already crowded space or addressing an unmet need.
“If I speak from an investor point of view, it’s very easy to understand which company, easy not easy, but at least you filter it. You can filter the 100,000 applications to at least find the ones that you’re not sure about. And that goes to, does this person who’s creating this company solve a real problem? And while solving that problem, are they also offering something which is not there in the market? So is there any white space in the market that this company is filling?” she says.
The founder is just as important, according to Soundous. “Once the operational part is discussed with the investor, I think the second thing that they look at is the founder. I believe that any idea can actually get into a big company, but it also depends on the founder and who is behind it, how they think, do they have the right skills to be able to fit into the entrepreneurship skin. Not everyone can actually be an entrepreneur,” she adds.
At this stage, Soundous says she is looking for support that can help MoroMaa grow without losing sight of its original vision. “At least from my end, it’s more considered as a seed fund. I just started the company. I need someone to help me scale to a larger audience because that needs a lot of money. Sometimes you cannot just… There are a lot of things that happen, but like website is there, manufacturing is there, operational is there. Having the right people is very important because you are the founder, you have the bigger vision, but then the execution and the other brains that bring all that vision together is the team,” she says.
Building that team, however, comes with its own challenges. “It’s very difficult to attract good brains and good profiles, because those people, they know their worth, so they ask for good salaries, and you cannot afford it at an early stage if you don’t have good funds in your bank account,” Soundous concludes.
