NOVI
India’s dogs have never been more loved or More looked after. Walk into any metro apartment complex on a Sunday morning and you will find Labradors being towelled dry after a bath, Golden Retrievers being combed out on the balcony, and Shih Tzus waiting patiently in their owners’ arms. The Indian pet parent of 2026 is attentive, informed, and spending more on their animal companions than any previous generation.
Yet pick up a bottle of dog shampoo from a pet store shelf in Mumbai, Delhi, or Bengaluru and read the label closely. In many cases, what you will find is a product that was never really designed with Indian conditions in mind.
A Market Growing Faster Than Its Products
India’s pet care market is on track to cross ₹20,000 crore by 2027. Urban pet ownership has grown sharply year on year, and the average metro household with a pet now spends meaningfully across food, grooming, health, and accessories.
The spending is real. The awareness is real. What has not kept pace is the product side of the grooming category.
Many formulations available in India were originally developed for different climates, water conditions, or grooming routines, and may not always reflect the realities Indian dogs actually live with. Others compete largely on price, with ingredient lists many consumers find difficult to interpret without complete information and context. The gap between what Indian dogs experience day to day and what most shelves offer is one of the defining features of the market right now.
What Indian Dogs Actually Deal With
To understand why a product built specifically for India matters, start with the conditions Indian dogs actually live in.
Hard water is a common reality across much of urban India. Its mineral content behaves differently during bathing than the soft water many imported formulas were developed around, and over time this can contribute to buildup on the coat, dullness that conditioning does not seem to fix, and post-bath dryness that owners often misattribute to the shampoo alone.
Then there is India’s climate. Monsoon humidity makes tick and flea exposure a near year-round consideration rather than a single season, a reality that differs from the temperate markets where many pet care formulas originate. A formula built around a summer-only pest season may not fully reflect the year-round grooming considerations many Indian pet parents face.
Different coat types and grooming routines also mean that dogs can have different cleansing and maintenance needs, which is why some brands choose to develop multiple formulations for different grooming situations.
Building from a Different Starting Point
The question that drives a genuinely India-specific pet care brand is not “how do we sell existing formulas in India?” It is harder and more useful: if you were building a dog shampoo specifically for Indian water, Indian climate, and Indian dogs, what would you do differently?
Answering that honestly leads to different choices in the Cleansing system, in how a formula is calibrated for a dog’s skin rather than a human’s, and in how openly the ingredients are disclosed. It is this last point that a new generation of Indian pet parents is beginning to ask for: not simply a promise on the front of the bottle, but the information needed to understand what is inside it.
A Different Approach
NOVI is an Indian pet care brand built on exactly this premise that Indian dogs deserve formulations considered specifically for Indian conditions, and that pet parents deserve to know what they are using.
NOVI has chosen to disclose complete INCI ingredient names so that pet parents have greater visibility into the products they use. The brand has also developed Separate formulations for different grooming needs rather than relying on a single general-purpose product, and is PETA Certified Cruelty-Free.
More about NOVI’s approach can be found at novipets.in.
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