There's a specific kind of silence that follows reading a debarment letter.
Not panic. Not anger. Just — silence. The kind where you sit with something and think, okay, so this is real now.
We got debarred from college because of low attendance. And honestly? It was because we were building this. Late nights sourcing fragrance oils. Days spent on formulations. Evenings packaging testers and writing honesty cards by hand. Somewhere in between, attendance became the thing that fell through the cracks.
We're not here to make that sound romantic. It wasn't. It was stressful and complicated and our parents had questions we didn't have clean answers to.
But here's what it taught us about building House of TBH — and maybe about building anything.
Commitment Looks Different From the Outside
When you're building something from scratch, the hours don't look like productivity to anyone watching. They look like distraction. They look like irresponsibility. A missed lecture here. A skipped exam there. From the outside, it looks like you don't care.
From the inside, you've never cared more about anything in your life.
We were two B.Com students at Delhi University who had become genuinely, almost uncomfortably obsessed with one question: why does India not have a fragrance brand that feels like it's actually from here?
Not inspired by Paris. Not named after a French word nobody can pronounce. Not wrapped in fake luxury language that makes you feel like you're supposed to be impressed before you've even smelled anything.
Just — honest. Indian. Real.
That question is what TBH was born from. And that question is what kept pulling us away from lecture halls and into research rabbit holes about aloe formulations and fragrance oil concentrations and Phad art and what it actually means to build something that smells like belonging.
The Honesty Wasn't a Strategy. It Was a Survival Mechanism.
Here's something nobody tells you about starting a brand with no money and no industry connections: you can't fake your way through it.
Big brands can afford mystery. They can hide behind glossy campaigns and vague ingredient lists and celebrity endorsements that cost more than our entire production run. They can afford to be opaque because opacity, ironically, is expensive.
We couldn't afford to be anything but honest.
So we put the ingredients on the card. The percentages. The pros. The cons. "Alcohol may dry your skin." We wrote that ourselves, on a card, and put it inside every order. Not because a compliance officer told us to. Because it felt wrong not to.
And something strange happened. People trusted us more because of it.
Turns out, the Indian consumer is not naive. They've been marketed to their whole lives by brands that overpromise and underdeliver. When something just tells the truth — even an uncomfortable truth — it hits differently. It feels like a person talking to them, not a brand performing at them.
That was the first real lesson House of TBH taught us.
What We're Actually Building
We're not trying to be the Indian version of a French perfume house. We're not trying to dress ourselves up in borrowed prestige.
We're trying to build something that, twenty years from now, someone picks up and says — this smells like a certain era of India. The one where two students refused to make something fake.
India has one of the richest fragrance traditions in the world. Ittar. Mogra. Sandalwood. Oudh. We grew up with these smells as memory, as ritual, as identity. And yet somehow, when Indian brands make "modern" fragrances, they reach for Paris first.
We reach for here.
Our packaging is Phad art — a centuries-old Rajasthani folk tradition. Our names are Hukum and Mahroon — words with weight in the languages we actually speak. Our formulas are transparent because we believe you deserve to know what you're putting on your skin.
This is what TBH means. The Bare Honest.
The Debarment Letter is Framed Now. Sort of.
We're kidding. It's not framed.
But we're also not ashamed of it. It's part of the story — the messy, unpolished, completely unsponsored story of two people who wanted to build something real and paid some real costs for it.
If you've bought from us, you're part of this story too. Every order funds the next experiment, the next scent, the next honest card written at 2am before a morning we probably should have spent in class.
We're still building. We're still learning. And we're still, stubbornly, being honest about all of it.
That's House of TBH.
Want to smell what radical honesty smells like? Start with our ₹199 tester pack — no commitment, no script, no fake luxury. Just the bare honest scent.