Hurriyah means freedom.
Freedom, to us, is not having to choose. Between something that works and something you feel good about buying. Between a product that belongs on your shelf and one you can stand behind. We made Hurriyah so you never have to pick one.
Hi, I'm Amir Naviwala, and I founded Hurriyah. I didn't come to this from beauty. I came to it from accounting.
For a couple of years I reconciled media spend for consumer packaged goods brands — big ones, with names you'd know the second you heard them. That work means living inside the line items, and the line items are sub-brands: dozens of product names I'd never once connected to each other, all rolling up into the same parent company. Then the same thing again under a different parent. After enough months of that, you can't walk through Walmart or Target the same way. You see the shelf the way the spreadsheet sees it — a lot of labels, a handful of owners.
It kept happening after I left, too. I'd find a brand I liked, something well made with real range to it, look up who was behind it, and there it was again: a tie, or a former tie, or a quiet connection to a company plenty of people have decided they'd rather not fund. Traveling only confirmed it. In Turkey, thousands of miles from any of it, I'd wander into a little corner grocery and the personal care shelf told the same story — small independent shop, and the deodorant on it still belonged to the same few parents whose line items I knew by heart.
At some point the obvious thought arrives. If the option people keep looking for isn't on the shelf, put it there.
We started with deodorant, and I was specific about what I wanted from it. Clean ingredients came first and were never up for negotiation. After that: no stinging, no irritation, nothing heavy or damp sitting on your skin all day, odor protection still doing its job the next morning, and a scent that reads professional.
The no-stinging part was personal. I have sensitive skin, and the baking soda that makes a natural deodorant work on odor is the same thing my skin reacts to when there's too much of it. Too little and it doesn't do its job. We went back and forth with our manufacturer through prototype after prototype until the baking soda sat at a level that still handles odor without the sting. Fifteen ingredients, no aluminum, a lactobacillus postbiotic and hyaluronic acid to keep skin conditioned, shea butter to soften the glide, and a proprietary fragrance formulated to meet the Target Clean and Sephora Clean ingredient standards.
We were careful about where it all comes from, and there our manufacturer's rep did us a favor. She flagged that the magnesium hydroxide in our formula was most likely coming from the Dead Sea. One ingredient out of fifteen. I told her I wanted it from anywhere else and left the choice of where to them, and they came back with a supplier in the United States, which I'm glad about for its own reasons. The new material behaved differently, so the formula had to be reworked around it and retuned until the feel was right. It would have been far easier to leave it alone. Almost nobody would have thought to ask. We changed it anyway.
No shortcuts. Every ingredient chosen on purpose, and sourced with a clear conscience.
Anything that outlives the product gets the same attention. I've always been happiest in the water, and I didn't want to put more plastic into it. So we use as little as we can, and where a container has to do the job, Eco Smart® plastic tubes made in the USA, designed to break down in nature in less than 10 years. Federal Package, who make them, have had them independently tested to the ASTM D5511 landfill and D6691 marine protocols.
And it had to be affordable, or none of the rest of it matters. We keep the operation lean and we take a sensible margin rather than the one this category has grown used to. That's why a stick is $9.99 instead of the twenty dollars the independent labels were asking when I started looking.
Some people will never think about where their deodorant comes from. Some think about it every time they shop. We built this for the second group, and the first group ends up with a better deodorant anyway. And if something isn't right for you, please write to us — keeping our customers happy is a big deal around here, and we'd far rather fix a problem than leave you sitting with one.
Amir NaviwalaFounder, Hurriyah
Hurriyah · Clean · Conscious · Uncompromising