How Solvara’s Supply Chain Focus Built Trust Around Gold-Grade Shilajit
Chand Makwana, Founder & Managing Director of Solvara, brings fifteen years of supply chain expertise from construction to the Ayurvedic supplement space. Solvara’s approach of working directly with growers and offering independently lab-tested shilajit sets them apart in a crowded market. This interview explores how product focus, authentic sourcing, and adapting for AI-driven search shaped their growth.
In this edition of the Ecommerce Authority Playbooks series, we dive into how
Solvara grows, retains customers, and prepares for the future of search in 2026 and beyond.
The interview
1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
Chand Makwana: I spent close to fifteen years in construction and building supply before Solvara existed, and honestly the jump into Ayurvedic supplements looks strange on paper. But the thread connecting both is sourcing. In building materials you learn fast that the person who controls the supply chain controls the quality, and everyone downstream is just guessing unless they’ve been to the source themselves. I applied that same logic to shilajit and ashwagandha. Most brands in this space buy from the same handful of distributors and repackage, so I went a different route and started working directly with growers and traditional practitioners instead of middlemen.
Where we differ is that every batch gets independently lab tested in the UK and those results are public, not just a claim on a label. Anyone can check what’s actually in the resin they’re buying. I’m not an Ayurvedic practitioner by training and I don’t pretend to be. What I bring is supply chain discipline from a completely different industry, and that turned out to matter more than a wellness background would have.
2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?
Chand Makwana: The biggest shift came when I stopped treating Shilajit as one SKU among many and made it the flagship product the whole catalog builds around. Early on we spread attention evenly across the range, and growth was flat because nothing had a clear identity. Once we leaned into Gold-Grade Shilajit as the anchor, with the resin texture and dissolution being things customers could actually verify themselves, word of mouth picked up in a way the powders never generated on their own.
The second turning point was bundling. The Source Pack pairing Shilajit with Moringa outsold either product sold alone by a wide margin, which taught me that customers new to Ayurveda don’t want to make ten small decisions, they want one clear starting point. That single insight reshaped how we built every bundle after it.
3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?
Chand Makwana: Organic search and email are doing the heavy lifting for us. SEO works because people researching shilajit or ashwagandha are already deep into comparison mode, reading about authenticity markers like resin color and bitterness before they ever hit our site, so content that answers those specific questions converts better than anything paid. Email matters just as much because supplements are a repeat purchase category, and a customer who trusts the first batch is far more likely to reorder than to be won over cold.
What I’ve learned is that trust has to be earned before the sale, not asserted during it. Publishing lab results and writing detailed sourcing content did more for conversion than any paid campaign has, because in this niche people have been burned by fillers and synthetic shortcuts before, so they’re actively looking for reasons to believe you rather than reasons to buy.
4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?
Chand Makwana: I noticed our traffic patterns shifting last year in a way traditional SEO metrics didn’t fully explain, people were arriving on the site already knowing specifics about shilajit grading that they hadn’t gotten from our pages directly. That told me they were getting summarized answers from AI assistants first and then coming to us to verify or buy. So I stopped writing content purely for Google’s ranking signals and started writing it so a language model could actually lift a clear, accurate answer out of it. That means naming things plainly, like stating outright what Gold-Grade Shilajit actually means in terms of resin purity, instead of burying it in marketing language.
The other change was making our lab results and sourcing details more structured and easier to pull out as standalone facts, rather than folding them into long narrative pages. AI tools tend to surface the clearest, most citable version of information, and vague or overly clever copy just doesn’t get picked up the same way. I still care about ranking, but I’ve started treating every product page like it might be the only paragraph an AI assistant ever quotes from us.
5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?
Chand Makwana: The single biggest thing is the unboxing moment with the resin itself. When someone opens Gold-Grade Shilajit for the first time, the texture and the way it dissolves in warm water either confirms everything we said about authenticity or it doesn’t, and we’ve built the whole first experience around making sure that moment lands. We send simple instructions on how to test it themselves, checking dissolution and bitterness, so the customer isn’t just taking our word for it, they’re verifying it the way I would have wanted to verify it as a skeptical buyer.
After that, it’s about timely, specific follow up rather than generic marketing emails. We reach out around the point their first jar would be running low with actual dosage reminders and simple usage tips, not just a discount code. That practical, useful contact does more for repeat purchases than any loyalty program has, because it treats the customer like someone building a routine rather than someone we’re trying to upsell.
6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?
Chand Makwana: Double down on picking one product and making it undeniable before you try to sell everything else. I wasted early months giving equal marketing weight to six SKUs when Shilajit alone could have carried the brand’s reputation if I’d focused there first. A founder one stage behind me should find their version of that flagship product and put every bit of proof, testing, and storytelling behind it before spreading attention thin.
What I’d stop entirely is treating supplier relationships as purely transactional. I used to negotiate prices as a nameless account with distributors, the way you would with any commodity supplier in construction. But going direct to growers and building actual relationships changed the quality of what we could offer and the story we could tell. It costs more time upfront and it’s slower, but it’s the difference between selling a product and selling a product you can actually stand behind.
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