The Box
The story of the PR box for The Girls Are Not Fine*, and the twelve brands who filled it.
I wrote The Girls Are Not Fine mostly alone, over a long stretch of my own life. And then it was finished and left me, and what happened to it next was no longer mine to decide. A book like this one doesn’t belong to the person who wrote it. It belongs to the women who read it and decide it’s worth pressing into someone else’s hands.
A book about women being unwell in a world that keeps calling them fine only matters if it moves between women; if it gets underlined at 2am and argued about in a group chat the next morning. Sitting in a warehouse on its own, it’s just paper.
So when it came time to announce the book, I didn’t want a launch that was only about me and my name on a cover. I wanted the first object that carried the book out into the world to be made the way I hope the book itself gets read: passed between women, and never once carried alone.
How it actually worked
I could have paid for this box entirely on my own. That was never the problem. The problem is what a PR box actually costs. Sending the hundred boxes out came to ₹2.94 lakh. The boxes themselves, which were very cool boxes, were another ₹1.16 lakh on top. I paid for every rupee of it (because I could) but most young brands, and especially the women-run ones, can’t. A single PR push that costs four lakh isn’t an easy decision!
So I covered the entire thing and threw the doors open. I put out a call for brands that wanted in, and more than 150 of them wrote back. Twelve made the final box. It wasn’t a lottery. I went through every applicant and chose on purpose, looking for women-owned and women-championed brands and products I actually loved.
A very necessary thank-you to Komal and Nimoli from Tute Consult, who helped turn this from a mildly unhinged idea into a hundred actual boxes. Holding together that many brands, products, timelines and moving parts was no small job, and I could not have pulled it off without them. If you ever need some KILLER PR support, trust Tute BLINDLY!
Here’s what went in, and why.
The brands
Atom Eats: Truffle Potato Chips & Truffle Banana Chips
Atom Eats was started by a couple who fell for each other over food: a Mumbai flavour obsessive and a lawyer who returned from London. That sense of fun runs through the brand. They use real truffle powder rather than relying entirely on the synthetic truffle flavoring that usually assaults you the moment you open a packet.
The truffle potato chips are excellent, but the banana chips are the interesting one to me. Atom Eats says they are India’s first truffle banana chips: a very clever update to the snack half the country grew up eating IMO!
Also, every PR box should contain at least one thing you want to tear open immediately. You should be able to eat something excellent while you read, and a good chip remains one of the most underrated companions to a good chapter.
Get it → Atom Eats
Local Ferment — Kombucha
Local Ferment Co is a Bengaluru fermentary making slow-fermented kombucha with real fruit and no preservatives. More importantly, they have managed to make kombucha for people who do not already enjoy kombucha. It is fizzy and tart without tasting like something you are drinking exclusively for the health benefits.
The box desperately needed something to drink, and Local Ferment was an easy choice. Open it cold, pour it over ice and have it beside you while you read. That it also happens to be good for you is a bonus.
Get it → Local Ferment Co.
Rasa Studio — Wax Sachet
Rasa Studio is a Delhi-based studio making soy-wax sachets topped with dried flowers and spices. You hang one inside a cupboard, drawer or wardrobe, where it scents the space without requiring another plug-in plastic air freshener. Once the fragrance begins to fade, you can melt the wax and use it again!
It is handmade, non-toxic, and far prettier than anything designed to live inside a cupboard strictly needs to be. The name helped too: rasa is the feeling or emotional residue a work of art leaves behind. A scented object designed to linger felt like good company for a book.
Get it → Rasa Studio
Conelle Studio — The Flower Hour candle
Conelle is a small candle studio, and The Flower Hour is exactly what it sounds like: a floral candle hand-poured into a weighty amber jar that looks good on a table before you have even lit it. Also, it smells just INSANELY good. EVERY single person who got the box told me how good they smell!
I liked the idea that you could light it, put your phone away and read for an hour. Or twenty minutes. We are not running a monastery. The point is simply to create a small pocket of time that belongs to you, while the rest of the day waits outside.
Get it → Conelle Studio
Taalmail — Stickers & a bookmark
Taalmail is an independent art studio that illustrates everything it sells. The name comes from the Hindi word taalmel, meaning harmony, and the brand makes stickers, bookmarks, and other paper goods for people who still write in margins, leave handwritten notes, and refuse to let stationery become entirely functional.
Its bookmarks and stickers are for the readers who cannot leave a blank page alone. Use them to mark the lines that make you angry, underline the bits you want to send to a friend, and save the pages you know you will return to. The bookmark also means you can stop folding down corners, although I am aware some of you will continue doing it anyway (just like me!)
Get it → Taalmail
JuJu’s Crochet Corner — Handmade Crochet Bookmark
JuJu’s Crochet Corner is a one-woman operation making everything from tiny amigurumi creatures to the crochet bookmarks inside this box. Every piece is made by hand. It is also the smallest brand here by some distance.
Each bookmark represents a meaningful amount of one woman’s time. Putting a hundred pieces of her work into a hundred people’s homes was exactly the kind of leverage I wanted this box to create. It is probably the most tender object in the box and the one you are most likely to still have tucked inside a book years from now.
Get it → JuJu’s Crochet Corner
Bare Necessities — Sunset Waves soap
Founded by Sahar Mansoor, Bengaluru-based Bare Necessities was India’s first B Corp-certified zero-waste enterprise. It has been doing the sustainability thing since long before every second company discovered brown paper packaging and began calling itself conscious.
By the company’s count, its work has kept more than 83 million units of plastic and over three lakh kilograms of waste out of the system, while creating stable green livelihoods for women. Its soaps are handmade and cold-processed, and Sunset Waves—the lavender-and-rose bar in the box—was nominated for Best Soap at the Grazia Beauty Awards.
It is a genuinely beautiful bar of soap that replaces a plastic bottle, supports women’s employment and makes an everyday chore feel marginally less bleak. That is more than enough reason to put it in.
Get it → Bare Necessities
Antinorm — Shower in Seconds
Antinorm makes beauty products for people who do not want beauty to become a constant cognitive weight in their lives. Its entire premise is that taking care of yourself should not require ten products, an hour-long routine, constant product juggling, and a bathroom shelf groaning under the weight of your good intentions.
Shower in Seconds is a pH-balanced, fragrance-free body-cleansing spray that does not require water. It is for flights, hospital visits, post-gym emergencies, rushed workdays and all the moments when a proper shower is simply not happening. One bottle can also replace the stack of disposable wipes people would ordinarily use instead.
I wanted it because it solves an extremely real, extremely unglamorous problem. Women already spend enough time maintaining themselves. Anything that hands some of that time back is worth paying attention to.
Get it → Antinorm
Chantèro — Bequest & Dame discovery sets
Chantèro is an independent fragrance label with a real sense of theatre, from the names of its perfumes to the satin-lined boxes they arrive in. Its fragrances are formulated in France and produced in India, combining French perfumery expertise with Indian craftsmanship.
The box contains discovery sets of Bequest and Dame. Both are extraits with a 24% oil concentration, which means you are getting a genuinely rich, concentrated perfume rather than a scent that disappears somewhere between leaving the house and getting into the cab. Hot damn.
Discovery sets also make far more sense than blind-buying an entire bottle because somebody on the internet told you it smelled expensive. Fragrance is personal. Try both on your skin, live with them for a few hours and decide for yourself.
Get it → Chantèro
Atypiical — Tinted sunscreen sachet kit, 8 shades + 3-in-1 SPF
Atypiical makes tinted sunscreen for Indian skin in eight incredible shades, from fair-cool to deep-golden, rather than producing one beige tint, calling it “universal” and hoping nobody notices and complains.
Each shade is pigment-matched to disappear into the skin instead of leaving behind the grey or white cast that brown women have been told to tolerate for years. The brand tested its formulations on dozens of Indian women in Indian heat, and its 3-in-1 SPF is designed to combine three separate morning steps in one product.
The sachet kit lets you test the shades before committing to a full-size tube, which is how complexion products should always be sold online. Try them in natural light, find the one that genuinely vanishes into your skin, and ignore anyone who tells you to “make the shade work.”
Get it → Atypiical
HealCycle — Menstrual Cramp Relief Patches
HealCycle is building an app for the hormonal and mental-health part of having a menstrual cycle, especially PMS, PMDD and the mood changes that are routinely dismissed as “just hormones.” It lets women track symptoms, moods and journal entries across their cycle, then uses that information to show patterns, forecast difficult days and generate reports that can be shared with a doctor. It also offers daily recommendations, guided meditations and an AI companion called Tara for emotional-regulation support. More than 2,500 women are already using it.
The physical product inside the box is a set of three menstrual cramp-relief patches: designed to be worn beneath your clothes on painful days.This box HAD to have something for menstruation in it. A book about what women’s lives actually feel like cannot skip the days when some of us are doubled over in pain. I have time for anyone building for the unglamorous realities of a woman’s body.
Get it → HealCycle
Mevyl — Stella’s Tiara, solid perfume
Mevyl makes solid perfumes, which make an absurd amount of sense. They cannot spill inside your bag, are easy to travel with, and let you reapply your fragrance without fumigating everyone seated near you.
The perfumes come as alcohol-free, skin-friendly balms that you dab directly onto your pulse points. Each one is inspired by a well-known luxury fragrance, but costs considerably less than the bottle sitting behind the glass counter at the department store.
Stella’s Tiara, the fragrance inside the box, is Mevyl’s interpretation of Dior’s Purple Oud: oud warmed with saffron and pink pepper. It is rich, compact, and just dramatic enough. A small luxury you can carry everywhere without having to treat it like an explosive device every time you pack a suitcase.
Get it → Mevyl
That’s the box
Twelve brands, chosen from more than a hundred and fifty, most of them run by women who had every reason to be protective of their thin margins and sent me their best work anyway. None of them had to. They did it because the pitch was simple: let’s put our things in one box and reach further together than any of us could alone.
To every founder who trusted me with what she makes, thank you. You turned a book launch into something far more special. I hope people fall in love with your work the way I did.
Most of you reading this won’t receive one of the hundred boxes. But every brand inside it is linked above. If something caught your eye, click through. Follow them, buy from them, or send the link to somebody who would. A hundred boxes can only travel so far; the point of writing this was to help these brands travel further.
And if you do receive a box, don’t let it stay sealed on a shelf. Open everything. Pass something from it to a woman having a harder week than you are. When you finish the book, press that into someone else’s hands too.
The Girls Are Not Fine is out now.