For this month’s edition, Creature Companion interacted with Phelenx Healthcare’s founder duo, Darshan & Rucha Govani. Both of them come from a pharmaceutical background and have worked in some of the most reputed healthcare companies for developed markets. Bringing in their collective experience of over a decade, they formed Phelenx Healthcare LLP, which develops and manufactures quality products for healthcare & wellness. Early this year, they entered pet care segment by pioneering ‘pet sanitizers’ in India, which eventually gained momentum with successful collaborations. We got an opportunity to connect with the founders and dive deeper into what this new age enterprise has in store for pet care segment. Here are some excerpts of the conversation…
Tell us about how Phelenx was formed.
About 5 years ago, Phelenx was formed as ‘Phelenx Animal Health’. Back then, it started with aquaculture, ruminants, and poultry. With an aim to diversify and extend our capabilities, we recently co-founded ‘Phelenx Healthcare LLP’, where we develop and manufacture products across animal nutrition, pet grooming, human nutrition and cosmetics.
What according to you is distinctive about Phelenx?
Phelenx is a unique venture with a partner-led and proactive approach. We provide value-driven collaborations across contract development and manufacturing, co-branding, licensing, and brand designing. Our partners are companies having a shared vision and delivering carefully developed, quality products for domestic and international markets. As we are primarily a B2B enterprise, our brands are exclusively available only on selected online platforms.
How do you think you can apply your novel approach to the pet care sector?
For this sector, our differentiated approach is targeted to complement the pet care companies in their endeavour of introducing the finest products for pets. We offer them an end-to-end proposition – from ideation to manufacturing and branding.
When did Phelenx plan to enter the pet care segment and introduce pet sanitizers in India?
We had planned to enter pet care segment around the end of last year with a diverse product portfolio that also included the pet sanitizer. Our objective was to cater to the unmet needs with innovative and value-added solutions. Unfortunately, in early 2020, world witnessed unprecedented impact of COVID-19. There were increasing incidences of people abandoning their pets during this time and this triggered us to take lead for introducing pet sanitizer in India. To spread awareness about the evolving situation concerning companion animals, we started an initiative ‘Corona and Companions’. Parallelly, we also prioritized rolling out SaniCan, our pet sanitizer on online platforms to support pet hygiene. Eventually, towards the second half of this year, our product gained incremental reach as it was also launched by our partners in their brands.
Interesting! Tell us more about your pet care portfolio and future outlook.
On 26th August 2020, International Dog’s Day, to mark it as a milestone, we released a curtain-raiser for our exclusive product range across pet nutrition and grooming consisting of some of the ‘first of its kind’ products. As part of our future development plan, we are working on quite a few disruptive and novel concepts. For instance, in pet grooming, topical probiotics for healthy canine and feline skin microbiome is one such promising area we are focusing upon. We, together with our partners, aspire to be a part of maximum pet families with our products curated with love and passion.
To conclude, elaborate a bit on how Phelenx looks at ‘Pet Care’.
Pet Care is very special and exciting, and Phelenx looks at it as an opportunity to reciprocate the sheer unconditional love that pets bring to the families that they become a part of. At the heart of everything we do, our goal is to put forward our best for pets, empathize with pet parents, and synergize with pet care partners. We, at Phelenx, are driven by a common purpose of ‘being together for good health’ with integrity, passion, and commitment.
