A Parcel of Happiness with Brown Living

The magical world of online shopping has made our lives so much easier. No more hunting through various stores to find that particular item that you want, now you can scroll through any e-commerce marketplace and find hundreds of options to pick from! Everything from your favourite shampoos and body lotions to food items and clothes is just a click away. And that is why sites like Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra are so popular right now. While all these e-commerce marketplaces seem amazing, they do have a few glaring issues. One of them is how much wastage they contribute to our planet on a daily basis.

Every time we receive a parcel of happiness, we also receive an item that is wrapped up with an unnecessary amount of plastic packaging that we eventually dump into our dustbins. That plastic then ends up getting burnt or thrown into a landfill or the ocean. And sadly, it later ends up in the food we eat and the water that we drink.

While large corporations have played a humungous role in the destruction of our environment and health, we as individuals have also lent a hand to the same. Social media has led to exuberant overconsumption of fast fashion and cheap products with a short shelf life. One of the best things we can do is unlearn consumerism and go back to buying good quality products that will last us a long time. We, here at Roadfolk, have found the perfect sustainable online marketplace that offers you just that!

Brown Living is India’s first-ever Plastic-Free e-commerce marketplace that provides you with a wide range of specially curated sustainable, vegan, chemical-free and zero waste products for everyday use. Each of the products listed on their website is made locally in India and handpicked after evaluating its environmental impact.  All their orders are packaged and shipped using plastic-free packaging materials. And that’s not all! Brown Living also donates a part of its profits to plants trees in order to cancel out the carbon footprint caused during the delivery process.

Chaitsi Ahuja, the CEO and product curator of Brown Living, wants to help remove plastic from the picture altogether. The frequent travelling that came along with her first job pushed Chaitsi to become more conscious about her lifestyle. She started to partake in beach cleanups during the weekends as a way of giving back to the environment. But the enormity of our plastic problem really struck her a few years later when she found the wrapping of a biscuit packet that her then employers, Future Retail, were just promoting discarded on the beach next to a milk packet that was a decade old. Seeing something so old lying next to a product that she was just working on put into perspective that our plastic never disappears. This one small instance pushed her to research and find a way to make a change.

“Our grandmothers and mothers have all lived a very zero-waste or low-waste life,” says Chaitsi. Her sole aim at Brown Living is to help people change their mindsets. They work to encourage others to transition into an earth-friendly lifestyle, starting with the products that make up their homes. 

Brown Living sources its products from individuals, groups and brands that have made it their mission to create a positive environmental impact and be truly environment positive. “We check whether they’re paying their taxes on time, what kind of people that they work with. We make sure that their facilities are suitable and have good working conditions,” she says. 

Each product is run through their Brown Lens, a proprietary framework used to identify the right products by evaluating them in a holistic manner. This helps them curate a range of products from sustainable businesses that are true to their brand ethos. The Brown Lens also helps them identify areas of improvement for each product which they convey back to the vendors and manufacturers.

The best part about shopping on Brown Living is that the products are extremely reasonable. “It’s a very subjective thing to say that sustainability is expensive,” says Chaitsi. “There are no excuses, everything is available. The only thing is whether you want to make that choice or not.” So, if you’re ready to make the choice of living a sustainable lifestyle head over to Brown Living and check out the fabulous range of homegrown Indian products that they have to offer.

Written By Jessica Albuquerque,

Week 39, October 2021