At the age of 12, I promised myself I’d be pregnant by 30. I had this life plan mapped out since I was young. Being a goal-oriented person, the ideas of building a family, growing my personal life and starting a business were always top of mind for me. People can say that I plan too much and that I’m a control freak, but on the flight back to India this time, I watched King Richard [the biopic about Serena and Venus Williams] and a phrase from the film really resonated with me: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” My whole life, therefore, is one grand plan, and I’m always trying to figure out what’s next, and what I have left to achieve. But this also meant that I did two of the biggest—and most important—things at the same time. I got pregnant and gave birth to my daughter Dua, while creating my skincare line indē wild as the COVID-19 pandemic was raging.
What happened during the pandemic was that I finally had time. It was the perfect time to start giving shape to this idea of a skincare brand I’d had for a while, but was unable to focus on earlier. When you’re a full-time influencer, you’re always pulled in different directions, between all the trips and brand collaborations and shoots, that you don’t get the time to think about your own business. I was realising that from a career point of view, I was desperately looking for more. Honestly, being a Punjabi, entrepreneurship was in my blood. As an influencer, I had achieved everything there was to achieve—the brand deals, the parties, the collabs, the magazine covers. I had been the first at a lot of things, and in a lot of ways, I walked so that several others in my field—people who looked and sounded like me—could walk. I needed a new challenge and wanted to try my hand at something different.