How Agapi Sikkim’s Rinzing Choden Bhutia Is Building Beauty With Purpose

In Sikkim, beauty traditions have long been shaped by the relationship between people and the natural world. Plants, herbs and flowers are part of a shared knowledge passed down through generations, often within families and local communities. For Rinzing Choden Bhutia, Founder of Agapi Sikkim, this connection became the starting point for a beauty business with a purpose beyond skincare. Recognised with the Visionary Women’s Award at BEAUTY&YOU India 2026, Bhutia is building a brand that brings Himalayan ingredients and indigenous knowledge into contemporary personal care while creating economic opportunities for women in the region.

Agapi’s products draw on Sikkim’s biodiversity, incorporating locally available botanicals and ingredients such as yak butter, traditionally valued for its nourishing properties. But the brand’s relationship with its roots goes beyond what goes into a formulation. It is also about preserving knowledge, supporting local livelihoods and ensuring that the communities behind these resources have a place in the business they inspire.

Tradition Meets Skincare

The connection to traditional knowledge, for her, is personal. Growing up in Sikkim, she learnt about the properties of local plants through her grandmother, who introduced her to ingredients such as mugwort and rhododendron.

“I’d say tradition is where Agapi starts, and science is how we make it work for today’s customer,” she says. The brand combines this inherited knowledge with modern formulation standards and safety protocols, ensuring that products meet contemporary expectations for stability, consistency and performance.

Responsible sourcing is equally important to this approach. The aim is to encourage responsible cultivation and sustainable harvesting rather than simply draw on the region’s natural resources.

Creating Opportunities Beyond Employment

A significant part of Agapi’s work lies in its engagement with rural and indigenous women across Sikkim. Since 2019, the brand has been training women in soap making, skincare production and entrepreneurial skills, with an emphasis on helping them build independent sources of income.

“At Agapi, we believe that women empowerment must go beyond providing employment. It must create pathways to financial independence, entrepreneurship, and economic ownership,” Bhutia explains.

The distinction is important to her vision. Rather than limiting opportunities to jobs within the business, Agapi encourages trained women to become entrepreneurs and creates avenues for sourcing products from them. This gives their skills the potential to become sustainable income-generating ventures.

A Vision Rooted in the Himalayas

The next step is to expand this model through a proposed Common Facility Centre at Kabi in North Sikkim. The facility is envisioned as a shared space where women can access production infrastructure, advanced training, cultivation, processing and distillation facilities. Bhutia also hopes to build a network of women-led micro-enterprises and eventually extend the model across the Northeast.

For her, growth must go hand in hand with responsibility towards the landscape and communities that make the brand possible. “Ultimately, we don’t want to build a beauty brand that simply extracts value from the Himalayas. We want to build one that contributes to the people and ecosystems that make our existence possible,” she says.

The Visionary Women’s Award at BEAUTY&YOU India 2026 celebrates Bhutia’s approach to building a beauty business with purpose. With Agapi, she’s showing that beauty can honour heritage, champion sustainability and create opportunities for women, all while giving back to the communities that make it possible.