25 summers later.

For most of our lives, neither of us thought of heat or humidity as conditions. It was just summer. You went to school in it. Played in it. Took the bus in it. Came home sweaty, took a shower, changed, and went out again. You didn't analyse any of it. You just got used to it.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

— Søren Kierkegaard

Satyam spent a lot of those years playing cricket. Training after class. Matches that took up most of the day. Hours outside in heat, sweat and dust, followed by more of the same the next morning.

At twenty, he wasn't thinking about personal care. But he noticed things. Which products disappeared halfway through the day. Which ones became sticky once he started sweating. Which fragrances smelled good in the morning and completely different by evening. He didn't have the language for it yet. He just knew something wasn't quite working.

Soumya's days looked different. College in the morning. Three tuition classes after that, often in different parts of the city. Later, it became work, meetings, long commutes and the gym after work. Then there were treks, where the usual assumptions around showers, bathrooms and neat little routines disappeared fairly quickly.

Soumya's skin was dry and sensitive. Satyam's was oily to combination. Different skin. Different routines. Different lives.

And somehow, the same compromises kept showing up. One product worked well, but felt terrible. Another felt great, but didn't last. Something solved one problem and created another. Something smelled expensive at 9 AM and strangely generic by evening. Something sounded impressive on the label, then became fairly unremarkable once the day got difficult.

So we tried something else. Then another. And another. That is what most people do. We did too.

None of this felt like research. There were no spreadsheets. No formulation briefs. No meetings about consumer pain points. We were just buying personal care. Using it. Liking parts of it. Complaining about other parts. Moving on. But if you do that for long enough, you start noticing patterns.

“We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”

— John Dewey

What becomes uncomfortable in heat. What disappears when the day gets long. What needs to be reapplied. What leaves something behind on your clothes. What works perfectly in an air-conditioned room and behaves very differently once you step outside. You don't necessarily know why. You just know what you wish worked better.

Years later, when we started objectiv., those old observations began to sound less random.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

— Marcel Proust

Heat. Humidity. Sweat. Friction. Movement. Long days. The difference between how something feels when you apply it and how it feels six hours later. We realised we had been collecting the brief for years without knowing it.

And suddenly, the question changed. It was no longer:

Which product should we buy?

It became:

Why are we still choosing between things that should work together? Why should something that performs well have to feel unpleasant? Why should something that feels good disappear halfway through the day? Why should a daily product become another thing you have to think about again at 2 PM?

For years, we had worked around our personal-care products. We wanted to build products that worked around our lives. That was the beginning of objectiv. Not a sudden idea. Not a lightbulb moment. More like a conclusion.

We started with the day rather than the category. The heat outside the building. The commute. The hours at work. The movement between places. The sweat. The friction. The evening gym session. The unexpectedly long day.

Because performance isn't how something behaves in the first thirty seconds. It's what happens after you stop paying attention to it. That became the standard.

Looking back, 25 summers feels like a long time. Long enough for the small things to start adding up. A cricket ground in the afternoon. Three tuitions in one day. A crowded commute. A shirt you don't want to stain. A trek where the next shower is days away. A product that stopped working before you did. Small observations, repeated often enough, until you realise they were all pointing in the same direction.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

— Steve Jobs

We didn't spend 25 years trying to build objectiv. We spent 25 years living the conditions that eventually told us what objectiv. needed to be.

Maybe that is why the idea feels less like something we invented and more like something we finally put into words. The problem was never particularly complicated. People have long days. Conditions change. Bodies sweat. Friction happens. Plans change. Personal care should still work.

25 summers later, we finally had a name for the problem we'd been living with all along.

objectiv.