The Self-Care Entrepreneur – Interview with Panchali Mahendram, founder of Solace Home Spa

WORDS: HERMIONE EDWARDS

The Self Care Entrepreneur

Panchali Mahendra has set her sights on elevating the home self-care experience with Solace Home Spa. We discuss what it takes to up the ante in a saturated market

What do the first 30 minutes of your day look like, your morning routine? A workout followed by 10 minutes of meditation. I often seek ways to be inspired and set a realistic self-nourishing routine. Self-care has done exactly that for me, where I feel I have started my day achieving something and with a calm mind, I am able to face and conquer the challenges of the day ahead. What inspired you to start Solace Home Spa and how did you know it was the right time? The idea came to mind when I was having dinner with some girlfriends, the main dinner topic that kept arising was how with all the pressures and demands in life we were not able to fully unwind and reset after a full day. There was not a sufficient balance and a soothing mechanism to create a personal, tranquil time to reinvigorate without making it an additional burden. Plus, my husband and I hardly ever get time together to relax and this gave us the wonderful idea. What sets Solace apart from other home services in the same arena? The vision in launching Solace has always been to reimagine the home experience through the lens of the client. How to create an unintrusive comfort at home and how to make it a habitual part of your day without adding additional stress. I fully put myself in the clients’ shoes as a test case and we were extremely rigorous with the team we hired, their experience, and their client touch versus pushing volume. Our attention to detail from the beds and oil we use to the relaxation sounds and bespoke tailoring to the client’s needs are all part of our sound and fragrance curated experience. How does Dubai’s self-care industry differ to the F&B industry you previously worked in and have you learnt anything new? There are many similarities in focusing on refinement of the details and high standards of service around the customer experience. The restaurant background gives you that core. It has always been important to me to evolve and reach new audiences. In self-care you can focus even more on the client with less elements involved to achieve the full experience, versus hospitality that contains many steps from the kitchen to the final client experience. In both cases it is a narrative that comes with a lot of emotion and feeling. Thankfully with both industries I’ve been able to maintain the existing essential emotional connection whether it is with food and beverage or personalised self-care. The hospitality industry took a hit during the pandemic, how did you navigate through this? I think the biggest challenge was dealing with the realities of working from home, and not being able to collaborate in the same space as well as dealing with continuous volatility and change. Personally, I find change

IMAGES: GETTY AND SUPPLIED energizing because it’s an opportunity to be creative. Looking back, I am so grateful for the tenacity and creativity of our teams, as we discovered new ways of working together and being creative while efficient. From being a Michelin star restauranter to having been featured in Power 50, how do you think these achievements has shaped you as a person? It is all about teamwork and shared purpose. Everyone contributes in some fashion whether small or large. It all narrows down to having a collective mindset. Today, what I think is important is more about an attitude towards success and less about raw perfection – a distinct attitude that enables a sense of belonging to a team effort as well as capturing individual expression. Being in the hospitality industry for as long as you have, what has been your biggest take away lesson? It is a highly instinctive industry, and we owe it to the people to create a sense of responsibility to achieve bigger and better whether it is trying out a new recipe or recreating an already existing one. It is an industry that needs constant recalibration as the client needs are changing constantly too. What piece of advice would you give your younger self? To embrace change and enjoy the iterative process of creating, exploring and learning. This is the Entrepreneur Issue – what key aspects have you learned from launching your own brand and what does being an entrepreneur mean to you? I think entrepreneurship means being focused on responsible approaches for a vast community. You are creating and solving for a broad audience whatever your idea is. Entrepreneurship is also a feeling of creative freedom, joy, ease and nostalgia, which is grounded in optimism.

“I think entrepreneurship means being focused on responsible approaches for a vast community.”