If you were planning to buy a Mama Earth product, just stop for a few minutes, read this article to find out what is wrong with Mama Earth and its products, and then make a better decision.
For people who have been in the skincare game for a long, we do not need to tell you that Mama Earth does not have a good rep in the Indian skincare community.
Just visit Reddit’s Indian Skincare Addicts community and you can find tragic tales of all the bad experiences people had with Mama Earth’s products.
But what exactly makes Mama Earth bad, if it is really as bad as people claim? In this article, we’ll try to bring forward all the facts about Mama Earth so that you can decide for yourself.
Before we get started, let’s take a look at the company itself, and how it operates.
Mama Earth is Not a Skincare Company?
Mama Earth was founded in 2016, along with the parent company Honasa Consumer Limited. On the ‘About Us’ page of the company, you can find the story of how Ghazal and Varun wanted to find baby care products but all of them contained ‘toxins.’
I swear the word ‘toxin’ has lost all of its meaning. So the couple decided to start a company that offers skincare and baby care products free of ‘toxins.’ What toxins we do not know.
But there is a problem here. Mama Earth does not have any manufacturing units. They do not even make their products. All of their products are outsourced by some third-party manufacturer.
Is that a bad thing? Not exactly. Almost all companies that get into the business do some kind of outsourcing. But then didn’t the company say they wanted to create ‘toxin-free’ products?
Well if they did, why is there no single patent filing by them? If there was no toxin-free product before them, they must be the first ones to do so. But they did not file any patent for that.
According to this post by Finshots, Mama Earth is a marketing company that goes crazy with marketing, selling the products outsourced by Honasa consumer limited. Read the post to find more interesting facts about them.
Now let’s come to the meat of the matter. Why do people hate Mama Earth so much? Let’s try to crystallize the hate and turn it into points.
Why Do People Hate Mama Earth?
Too Much Influencer Marketing
There was a time, and still is, when every single (and influential) YouTuber and Instagram influencer was talking about Mama Earth. But they were praising it for getting paid.
Mama Earth went crazy with its influencer marketing, spending more than 40% of its revenue on influencer marketing! No matter what video you watch, you’d see the YouTuber talking about their product for 1 or 2 minutes.
But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that they went with every influencer and YouTuber. You want to hear the opinion of a skincare influencer to help you make the right decision.
But Mama Earth went with gaming channels, reaction channels, vloggers, Moto vloggers, etc. This disruptive, explosive market made no sense. It just showed how desperate they are in promoting their products.
Remember that good products need marketing, and bad products need a lot of marketing. Mama Earth was doing more than a lot of marketing.
Bad Customer Review and Experience
No matter how strong your marketing game is or how deep your pockets are, bad products will always be bad products. The same is true for Mama Earth’s products.
Many people have claimed the best Mama Earth’s products can do is not work for you. The worst is they can cause even serious issues.
It is understandable why the company fails to deliver products that work for many people; they do not have an R&D unit to make or improve their products. They outsource their products.
So some products may work for some people, but a majority of them, especially products that require a lot of R&D are just ineffective.
We are not just stating hearsay. We have tried many of their products. And apart from their onion hair mask that worked a bit (but was not impressive), all of their products did nothing.
We have tried Mama Earth’s:
- Vitamin C Day Cream
- Urban Face Scrub
- Onion Hair Serum
- Onion Hair Mask
- Sunscreen Body Lotion SPF 30
Low-Quality Products
Poor management and quality control are other issues with the company. Read the reviews of the people who ordered their products and you will see a lot of them complaining about how they received a leaking bottle or tampered product.
Other issues including poor inventory tracking, a lot of order cancellations, return and refund issues, etc are some of the problems that are apparent with the company. Read this article to know more.
Perhaps if they reduced their 40% marketing budget and used the money in inventory management and quality control, it would be much better for the company and the customers.
Poor Marketing
How can a company that spends 40% of its revenue in marketing be poor at it? Well, apparently money cannot buy everything. Almost all of their products focus on buzzwords like “toxin-free,” “organic,” “natural ingredients,” etc, and not on the real ingredients.
Can you imagine seeing a product from The Ordinary and the first thing you read is “Toxin-free, soothes skin.”
Shady Reviews
We scanned their website’s reviews and found something shady. Remember we said the money cannot buy everything? Perhaps it can buy fake reviews! The reason we think these are fake reviews is that not a single review talks about any defect in the products.
Some products have 300 reviews, with 3 or 4 1-star reviews. Yet we could not find the review when we scanned all the 300+ reviews.
Even the reviews with 3 stars are just praising the products.
Rip-off Designs
Mama Earth recently launched its Aqua Glow face moisturizer with Himalayan Thermal water (?). Apart from asking what Himalayan thermal water is, if you look at the bottle, it might remind you of some other product.
Take a look at the bottle.
Now take a look at one of the best face moisturizers that sadly does not have Himalayan Thermal water but works just fine; Neutrogena HydroBoost face moisturizer. Looks similar right?
Conclusion
So is Mama Earth a bad company? No. Their products, in our reviews, have consistently performed poorly. So yes, they do make bad products.
There is a lack of focus on the actual ingredients and a lot of marketing makes us think the company is overcompensating for not having anything great in its product line.
But if their products suit your skin or hair, then go ahead and get it. Just remember to take care of your skin
Take a look at why people hate Biotique and what’s really wrong with them.
