How a chance meeting at a roadside retail counter in 2022 became JiViSa's first hospitality project - and grew into a full resort wellness programme across Ganga Kinare and VILEEN Rishikesh, covering amenities, spa formulations, treatment protocols, therapist training and guest rituals.
Quick answer
Resort amenities and spa products are two halves of one guest experience, not two purchase orders. At Ganga Kinare and VILEEN Rishikesh, JiViSa built both — in-room amenities, spa oils, treatment protocols, therapist training and guest rituals — over four years, from a single rose gift box.
The engagement at a glance
| Client | Himalayan Hotels Pvt. Ltd. — Ganga Kinare, Rishikesh and VILEEN Rishikesh |
| Started | 2022, at a retail counter at Namaste Midway, Mansurpur |
| Still running | Yes — four years and counting |
| First project | A five-product rose wellness gift box |
| Scope today | Wet amenities · turndown wellness · guest gifting · spa oils and formulations · spa menu development · treatment protocols · therapist training · spa SOPs · Ayurvedic guest rituals · a JiViSa retail store on property |
| Therapists trained | 5 |
| Spa | Samagra Spa at VILEEN |
| What the brief ruled out | International amenity labels; anything that read as rustic; cheapest-wins procurement |
| What it ruled in | Himalayan provenance, recyclable and reusable packaging, recycled wood, local sourcing, plastic reduction |
Contents
- Why this partnership is worth reading about
- The brief was simple. The standard was not.
- Resort amenities are not hotel amenities
- The first project: a rose wellness box
- The Resort Amenity Stack: five layers most briefs only cover two of
- From products to a Himalayan wellness language
- Then came VILEEN — and the brief went deeper
- The Spa Build Sequence: seven stages from product to protocol
- Himalayan ingredients, without the rustic-wellness look
- Rituals guests could actually experience
- The quality test nobody plans for
- Five mistakes resorts make when briefing a wellness partner
- Do you need a supplier, a formulator or a wellness partner?
- What our client says
- The resort wellness brief: a checklist
- FAQs
- Working with JiViSa
Why this partnership is worth reading about
Sometimes the best partnerships don't start in a boardroom. Ours started at a retail counter.
In 2022, Tarun Gulati, MD & CEO of Himalayan Hotels, came across JiViSa during our brief stint at a retail space at Namaste Midway, Mansurpur, while driving from Delhi towards Rishikesh. He was looking for something very specific for Ganga Kinare: authentic, local and premium hotel amenities and sustainable gifting — without relying on an international brand.
That conversation became our first hospitality project. Four years later the relationship is still going, and it has grown far beyond amenities.
Today, JiViSa works across the Himalayan Hotels portfolio at Ganga Kinare and VILEEN Rishikesh, creating wellness products, spa formulations, treatment experiences, guest rituals, gifting, packaging and training. VILEEN is positioned as a five-star wellness resort in Rishikesh and a unit of Himalayan Hotels Pvt. Ltd., with Samagra Spa built around holistic wellness and ingredients rooted in Uttarakhand's natural and spiritual heritage.
This is the story of how that evolved — and what we would tell any resort owner reading it with a similar brief on their desk.
If you are earlier in the process and still working out what a property is obliged to provide, start with our complete guide to hotel amenities in India. If your question is about branding and private label specifically, the JW Marriott custom amenities case study covers that ground. This article is about the resort problem, which is a different problem.
The brief was simple. The standard was not.
Ganga Kinare did not want another international amenities label. They wanted something authentic to the region without making the in-room experience feel rustic or compromised.
The thinking was ahead of the usual "local is good" brief. The products had to be Himalayan in spirit, premium in presentation, thoughtful in formulation, and practical for hospitality — all four, at once. There was also a firm sustainability line: recyclable and reusable packaging, recycled wood, local materials, plastic reduction, locally sourced inputs.
And quality mattered more than finding the cheapest option. That became one of the defining characteristics of the relationship, and it is worth saying plainly because it is rarer than it should be. Most resort amenity briefs arrive as a price per unit with a wish list attached. This one arrived as a standard with a budget attached. The order of those two things changes everything downstream.
Resort amenities are not hotel amenities
India is now the seventh-largest wellness market in the world, worth $180 billion in 2024 and growing 11.3% a year since 2019, according to the Global Wellness Institute. Almost every resort in the country has read a version of that number and responded by adding a spa. Far fewer have changed how they buy amenities.
That gap is the part the category gets wrong, and it is why a city-hotel amenity programme dropped into a resort usually underperforms.
A city hotel guest stays 1.4 nights, showers twice and leaves. A resort guest stays three to five nights, uses the spa, sits by the river, changes clothes four times a day and goes home with whatever they liked. The product is being used, not just placed.
| City hotel | Wellness resort | |
|---|---|---|
| Average stay | 1–2 nights | 3–5+ nights |
| Amenity consumption | Low; often untouched | High; refills expected |
| What the guest notices | Packaging, brand name | Texture, fragrance, how skin feels on day three |
| Fragrance strategy | Neutral, inoffensive | Tied to place and time of day |
| Spa relationship | Spa is a separate P&L | Spa is the reason they booked |
| Retail potential | Marginal | Real — guests ask where to buy |
| Sustainability scrutiny | Corporate policy driven | Guest-facing; nature-adjacent properties get judged harder |
| Right supplier profile | Volume amenity manufacturer | Formulation partner who can also build the spa |
Read that last row again. It is the whole argument. A resort buying only bottles from an amenities vendor and only oils from a spa distributor ends up with two unrelated fragrance stories in one property — bathroom saying one thing, treatment room saying another. Guests do not articulate this, but they feel the seam.
The first project: a rose wellness box
The first project for Ganga Kinare was a gifting box built around rose.
It brought together a Rose Ubtan, Rose Face Oil, Rose Mist, a Rose & Lavender Lip Balm and a Kesara Illume moisturiser — a small starting point compared with the work that followed, but it settled the founding principle: wellness products could be local, luxurious and contemporary at the same time.
Rose was not a decorative choice. Damask rose is grown and distilled across the Himalayan belt, it carries genuine skin function rather than only fragrance, and it reads as luxury without needing a French label to explain itself. The ubtan format did similar work — a practice most Indian guests recognise from home, presented at a standard they associate with a spa.
That box is why everything after it was possible. It gave the property something physical to react to, which is worth more than six weeks of specification documents.
The Resort Amenity Stack
Over four years across two properties, the work sorted itself into five layers. We now use this as our own briefing structure, because most incoming briefs cover layers one and two and then discover layers three to five nine months later, mid-season, at speed.
| Layer | What it covers | Who owns it internally | Commonly missed? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Bath | Shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, lotion, soap, handwash — bottles or dispensers | Housekeeping | No |
| 2. In-room dry | Dental, shave, comb, slippers, sanitary, loofah | Housekeeping / purchase | No |
| 3. Turndown & ritual | Sleep mists, balms, teas, oil rituals, bath salts | Housekeeping + F&B | Often |
| 4. Spa back-bar | Massage oils, scrubs, wraps, masks, facial actives, therapist consumables | Spa manager | Usually |
| 5. Retail & gifting | Take-home SKUs, welcome gifts, celebration gifts, wedding and MICE boxes | Spa + sales | Almost always |
Two observations from running this at Ganga Kinare and VILEEN:
Layer 4 sets layer 1, not the other way round. If the spa's signature blend and the bathroom's shower gel are developed by different companies, you cannot retrofit coherence. Start at the spa and work outwards.
Layer 5 is the one that pays. Retail and gifting is the only layer that generates revenue rather than consuming cost per occupied room, and it is the layer most briefs never mention. At VILEEN it eventually became a JiViSa retail store on the property, opened at Tarun's invitation.
From products to a Himalayan wellness language
Once the relationship moved past the initial brief, the work widened considerably.
The ingredient palette evolved according to product and wellness need, drawing on bitter orange, jatamansi, Himalayan cedar, apricot and locally sourced herbs, alongside cold-pressed regional oils.
The goal was never to put "Himalayan" on a label and call it a day. Provenance had to be built into the product: the ingredient, the sensory experience, the packaging, the way the product would be handled by a therapist or a guest, and how it would sit inside the larger property experience.
Over time this extended into wet amenities, turndown wellness products, guest gifting, Ayurvedic guest rituals, spa oils and formulations, spa menu development, treatment protocols, therapist training, spa SOPs and experience design.
In other words, we stopped being an amenities supplier and became a wellness partner. That is not a title upgrade — it is a different scope of accountability, and it is worth being precise about what it means, which is what the next two sections do.
Then came VILEEN
VILEEN was the natural next step. Ganga Kinare had already established trust, so when Himalayan Hotels developed VILEEN Rishikesh, JiViSa was invited to help build a much broader wellness proposition.
VILEEN sits in the lower Himalayan landscape and is positioned as a five-star wellness resort, with Samagra Spa at the centre of its offering. The property describes Samagra — Sanskrit for whole, entire — as a holistic wellness destination drawing on Uttarakhand's spiritual heritage, combining traditional practice with contemporary sensibility.
This time the brief went deeper. We did not only create the spa products. We helped build the spa.
For VILEEN, JiViSa's role covered the experience from the inside out:
- Designing the treatment menu
- Creating treatment names and their stories
- Developing massage protocols
- Formulating massage oils, scrubs, lotions and other spa products
- Training therapists — five, in this engagement
- Training spa management
- Writing SOPs
- Recommending treatment durations
- Curating the overall spa experience
- Designing Ayurvedic and wellness rituals
The thinking throughout was that products and treatments should be designed together, rather than a spa menu being assembled from a catalogue of disconnected services. That philosophy is visible in Samagra today, where the offering spans full-body experiences, Ayurvedic fusion treatments, focused body therapies, hands-and-feet rituals, holistic facials, scrubs, cocoon wraps, yoga, meditation and multi-day programmes.
The Spa Build Sequence
Here is the order we work in, and the failure that shows up when a stage gets skipped. Most resorts we speak to are somewhere in stages 3–5 without having done 1–2, which is why their spa menu reads like a list rather than a point of view.
| Stage | What happens | What breaks if you skip it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Sense of place | Decide what the property's wellness point of view actually is — landscape, season, local practice, guest reason for travel | The spa becomes generic; it could be anywhere |
| 2. Ingredient palette | Choose a defensible set of botanicals and oils, sourced and seasonal | You cannot tell a provenance story you did not build |
| 3. Formulation | Develop the back-bar: oils, scrubs, wraps, masks, lotions | Therapists improvise with retail-grade product |
| 4. Protocol | Sequence, pressure, duration, order of application, cues | Every therapist delivers a different treatment |
| 5. Menu & naming | Treatment names, stories, durations, pricing logic | Guests cannot tell two treatments apart |
| 6. Therapist training | Hands-on training on the actual products and protocols | The product is blamed for delivery inconsistency |
| 7. SOP & handover | Written standards, back-bar management, consumption norms | Quality decays within two seasons of opening |
Stage 6 is where most spa product suppliers stop supplying and start apologising. Sending oil is easy. Sending oil, then standing in the treatment room while five therapists learn to use it, is the part that decides whether the guest ever notices your formulation work.
Himalayan ingredients, without the rustic-wellness look
The most important decision across the whole project was balancing regional authenticity against luxury.
We wanted ingredients and rituals rooted in the Himalayas, but the finished experience still had to belong in a premium resort. In practice that meant using regional ingredients and cold-pressed oils thoughtfully while giving equal attention to texture, fragrance, packaging and design.
Indian wellness has a visual default — jute, kraft, hand-drawn leaf, terracotta, a Sanskrit word in a serif face. It is not wrong, but it is now so common that it signals inexpensive rather than rooted, which is the opposite of what a five-star wellness resort is paying for. Our position, and it is a position we will defend: provenance belongs in the formulation and the ritual, not in the styling.
The result was a wellness proposition that felt contemporary, considered and connected to the place, without relying on generic Ayurvedic visual language. The same standard governs our own clean-label and EU-compliance approach — what goes in the bottle has to survive scrutiny, whatever the bottle looks like.
Rituals guests could actually experience
The collaboration also went beyond the treatment room.
One example was an Ayurvedic oil-pulling ritual kit created for guests using JiViSa's cold-pressed Tila oil, which turned a traditional practice into something that could be introduced as part of a modern luxury stay. There were also bathing rituals and other guest-facing experiences, all designed so that wellness was something a guest could participate in rather than something that only existed behind a spa door for fifty minutes.
That approach lines up closely with how VILEEN positions its guest experience today, with curated baths, wellness journeys and multi-day programmes combining spa, yoga, meditation and time outdoors.
There is a commercial argument here as well as an experiential one. A ritual kit costs a fraction of a treatment, reaches every guest rather than the 20–30% who book the spa, and creates the product familiarity that makes the retail layer work. It is the cheapest bridge between layer 3 and layer 5 of the stack.
The quality test nobody plans for
Our favourite part of this partnership has nothing to do with order quantity. Guests still call us.
Years after their stay at Ganga Kinare, guests have reached out asking where they can buy the products they remember from the property. Two come up repeatedly: the Almond Rose Face Oil and the Gulaab Chandan Ubtan.
That is a different kind of validation. A hotel can approve a product. A procurement team can sign off on it. A spa can put it into a treatment. But when a guest remembers a product well enough to hunt for it after checkout, the experience has done something more — it has travelled home with them.
It is also the single most useful metric a resort can track for its amenity programme, and almost nobody tracks it. Ask your front office how many guests asked to buy something from the room or the spa last month. If the answer is zero, your amenities are functioning as a cost line and nothing else.
Five mistakes resorts make when briefing a wellness partner
We have made versions of most of these ourselves, so this is not finger-pointing.
1. Briefing on price per unit before deciding on standard. Cost per occupied room is a real constraint and deserves respect. But a brief that leads with it forces every supplier to answer the same narrow question, and you end up choosing between five near-identical proposals. Ganga Kinare led with standard. That is why the outcome was not generic.
2. Buying amenities and spa products from different companies. Two vendors, two fragrance philosophies, one guest. See the stack above.
3. Treating "local" as a claim rather than a supply chain. Regional sourcing is slower, more seasonal and occasionally short. If the brief says local but the penalty clauses assume industrial supply, the supplier will quietly source elsewhere and keep the label.
4. Approving a spa menu before the protocols exist. Names and durations get signed off in a management meeting; the therapist then has to invent what happens for those 75 minutes. Build stage 4 before stage 5.
5. Forgetting the retail question until after launch. Packaging, MRP labelling, batch sizes and shelf life all differ between back-bar and retail formats. Decide at formulation stage whether a guest will one day be able to buy it, because retrofitting that is expensive.
Do you need a supplier, a formulator or a wellness partner?
Not every property needs the full engagement described here, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. Use this to work out what you are actually shopping for.
Start here: does your property have a spa that guests book as a reason to visit?
- No, and amenities are a hygiene factor → You need an amenities supplier. Judge on consistency, lead time, packaging quality and MOQ flexibility. Our hotel amenities range covers this, and the pillar guide explains what to specify.
- No, but we want a branded in-room identity → You need a formulator / private-label partner. Judge on formulation control, scent development and artwork capability. The JW Marriott engagement is the closest example.
- Yes, and the spa already runs well → You need a spa product supplier with back-bar depth, therapist training and consistent resupply. Ask specifically who trains your team, and how often.
- Yes, and we are building or rebuilding the spa → You need a wellness partner. Judge on whether they can do stages 1–7 above, and ask to speak to a property where they did.
If you are unsure which row you are in, that is usually a sign the property has not yet answered stage 1. That conversation is worth having before you request a single quotation.
What our client says
"We, at Himalayan Hotels, were looking to upgrade our in-room amenities and didn't want to use any international brand. We wanted to source something authentic and local without compromising on the premium look and feel of our amenities. After having gone wrong with a couple of other vendors, we finally found Sarika and JiViSa quite serendipitously.
Not only are they extremely professional in meeting timelines and maintaining a set standard when it comes to product quality, they are also a very humble team which makes it a pleasure working with them.
They hear feedback closely and have a bias for action towards relentless improvement which is genuinely heart warming to observe from outside as a client.
I wish them all the best and I feel they will go a long way."
— Tarun Gulati, MD & CEO, Himalayan Hotels
The line we think about most is "after having gone wrong with a couple of other vendors." That is the normal state of resort amenity procurement in India, and it is not usually a vendor competence problem. It is a brief problem — and the brief is a shared responsibility.
The resort wellness brief: a checklist
Take this into your next supplier conversation. It is the shortest version of everything above.
- Point of view. Can you describe your property's wellness position in one sentence that would not fit any other property?
- Guest profile. Length of stay, reason for travel, season of peak occupancy
- Layers in scope. Which of the five stack layers are you buying now, and which in 12 months?
- Fragrance ownership. Are you willing to own a scent, or are you renting one?
- Sourcing standard. Local, regional, certified, or "reads local"? Say which, honestly
- Sustainability line. Packaging material, refill strategy, plastic reduction target, disposal reality
- Compliance. Labelling, batch, shelf life, and who holds responsibility for each
- Spa readiness. Do protocols exist? Who trains therapists, and how often after year one?
- Retail intent. Will a guest ever be able to buy this? Decide now, not later
- Volumes and seasonality. Realistic annual quantity plus your actual peak-month spike
- Review cadence. Who reviews the programme, how often, and against what
- The exit question. If this partner disappeared, how much of the guest experience leaves with them?
You can request the same checklist as part of a personalised quote, or download the current hospitality brochure.
The partnership kept evolving
Since that first project in 2022, the relationship has never paused.
Ganga Kinare became more than our first hospitality client. It became the foundation for a partnership that expanded into VILEEN, more product categories, deeper wellness integration and eventually a JiViSa retail store at VILEEN, opened in partnership after an invitation from Tarun Gulati.
That progression matters. The strongest hospitality partnerships do not end once the products are delivered. They grow as the property grows, they become more collaborative, and they move from "can you supply this?" to "can you help us build this?"
For a resort owner, the practical read is this: the supplier you choose for layer 1 is the supplier who will be standing there when you decide to build layer 4. Choose for the conversation you will be having in year three, not the purchase order you are signing in month one.
What this partnership taught us
Hospitality wellness is not really about products. It is about fit.
The right amenities fit the property. The right oils fit the treatment. The right ritual fits the guest. And the right story fits the place.
For Ganga Kinare and VILEEN, that meant building wellness around the Himalayan region without losing the polish expected of luxury hospitality. For JiViSa, it meant doing what a hotel amenities and spa products partner should do: listening closely, understanding the property, creating what is needed, and staying involved from concept through to execution.
Four years on, that is still the relationship. We think it says more than any catalogue could.
FAQs
What are resort amenities? Resort amenities are the guest-facing products and services a resort provides as part of the stay — bath products, in-room dry amenities, turndown items, spa back-bar products, ritual kits and retail or gifting SKUs. In a wellness resort they extend into treatments, rituals and programmes, because the amenity and the spa experience are read by the guest as one thing.
How are resort amenities different from hotel amenities? Longer stays, higher consumption, and far more attention paid to how a product actually performs. A city hotel guest may never open the shower gel; a resort guest uses it for five days, forms an opinion, and sometimes wants to buy it. Fragrance strategy, refill logic and retail readiness all change as a result.
What should be in a five-star resort amenity programme? At minimum: bath (shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, lotion, soap, handwash), in-room dry amenities, a turndown or ritual layer, a spa back-bar range, and a retail or gifting range. Our complete hotel amenities guide covers the classification and compliance detail.
Can one supplier provide both hotel amenities and spa products? Yes, and there is a strong argument for it: a single formulation partner keeps the bathroom and the treatment room telling the same sensory story. What matters is whether that supplier has genuine back-bar depth and can train your therapists, not just ship both categories.
Do you develop spa menus and treatment protocols, or only supply products? Both. At VILEEN, JiViSa designed the treatment menu, created treatment names and stories, developed massage protocols, formulated the products, trained five therapists and the spa management team, wrote SOPs and recommended treatment durations.
How long does it take to build a resort spa programme from scratch? It depends on how much of stages 1–2 the property has already decided. Formulation and sampling are rarely the bottleneck; agreeing the property's wellness point of view usually is. We have not published a standard timeline, because quoting one without knowing your stage would be misleading — ask us against your actual opening date.
What is a spa back-bar, and why does it matter? The back-bar is everything the therapist uses during a treatment: massage oils, scrubs, wraps, masks, cleansers, consumables. It matters because guests judge the spa on it and never see the label. Retail-grade product used as back-bar is one of the most common causes of inconsistent treatments.
Do you train therapists? Yes. Therapist and spa-management training was part of the VILEEN engagement, along with written SOPs. We treat training as part of the product, not an add-on — a formulation delivered without training is a formulation you will be blamed for.
Can boutique resorts and small properties work with you, or is there a large minimum? We work with boutique properties as well as larger portfolios, with flexible order quantities. Ganga Kinare started with a single five-product gift box. Tell us the property size and season and we will tell you honestly whether the format works. Start with a bulk or B2B enquiry.
What does "Himalayan sourcing" actually mean in your products? It means the ingredient palette is built from botanicals and cold-pressed oils that genuinely come from the region — apricot, jatamansi, Himalayan cedar, bitter orange, rose, local herbs — and that provenance is expressed in the formulation and the ritual rather than only on the label. More on our approach in Our Story and JiViSa Cares.
Are your products vegan, paraben-free and EU-compliant? Our formulations follow clean-label and EU-compliance standards, and we have written openly about what we mean by "clean" rather than leaving it as a marketing word. See what clean really means at JiViSa and our clean-label and EU compliance explainer.
Can resort amenities be made sustainable without looking cheap? Yes, and this project is largely an argument that they must be. Recyclable and reusable packaging, recycled wood, local materials and plastic reduction were all part of the Ganga Kinare brief, and none of it required the rustic visual language the category defaults to. Our sustainability position sets out how we approach it.
Should resort amenities be available for guests to buy? If your guests are asking, yes — and they will ask more often than most properties realise. Retail is the only layer of the amenity stack that generates revenue instead of consuming cost per occupied room. Decide it at formulation stage, because packaging, labelling and shelf-life requirements differ from back-bar formats.
What is the difference between a spa product supplier and a wellness partner? A supplier ships product against a purchase order. A wellness partner is accountable for whether the guest experience works — which means formulation, protocol, menu, training, SOPs and review. The decision tree above helps you work out which one your property actually needs right now.
Do you do custom branding and private label for resorts? Yes. Format, scent, formulation and artwork can all be developed for a property. The JW Marriott case study documents how that process runs in practice, including the levels of customisation available.
Do you supply guest gifting, welcome gifts and wedding or MICE boxes? Yes — that is layer 5 of the stack, and it was where the Ganga Kinare relationship began. For corporate and event volumes, our corporate gifting guide and the gifting collection are the starting points.
Do you work with spas outside hotels? Yes. We also run our own women-only healing spa, the JiViSa Rejuvenation Center in Gurugram, which is where a good deal of our protocol and training thinking gets tested before it reaches a client property.
How do I start a conversation about my property? Send us the property, the layers you are considering, and your season. Request a personalised quote, download the hospitality brochure, or get in touch directly.
Working with JiViSa
JiViSa partners with hotels, resorts and spas across India to create resort amenities, spa products, wellness gifting, Ayurvedic rituals and guest experiences — from formulation and packaging through to therapist training and implementation.
Your property has a story. Let's build the wellness experience around it.
- Request a personalised quote — tell us the property, the layers and the season
- Explore the hotel and resort amenities range — formats, ranges and customisation
- Download the hospitality brochure — the full 2026 catalogue
- Talk to us about volumes — flexible MOQs, boutique to portfolio
For context on how we work with businesses more broadly, see JiViSa for Business. To meet the people who would be on your project, see Team JiViSa, or follow the work on LinkedIn.
Sources and references
- Global Wellness Institute — Global Wellness Economy: Country Rankings and the accompanying GWI data release: India ranks 7th globally with a $180 billion wellness market (2024), growing 11.3% annually between 2019 and 2024; the global wellness economy stood at $6.8 trillion in 2025.
- VILEEN Rishikesh — Samagra Spa & Wellness: treatment categories, positioning and ingredient sourcing.
- Ganga Kinare Resorts & Hotels: portfolio, properties and wellness positioning.
- Tarun Gulati, Himalayan Hotels — interview, Hospemag: background on the group's development approach.
- First-hand engagement records: JiViSa × Himalayan Hotels, Ganga Kinare and VILEEN Rishikesh, 2022 onwards.
Written by the JiViSa hospitality team. Client engagement led by Sarika Panchhi, Founder & CEO, JiViSa Wellness.
