The business of beauty

Navaz Ghaswala is the executive vice president of Forever Living Products, Arizona’s largest private company. With her husband Darius and children Sonia and Kevin, the Ghaswalas are one among an estimated 70 Zoroastrian families in Arizona who get together three or four times a year, as per a profile on the lady by Anne Robertson in The Business Journal, a Phoenix publication. A copy of the article was provided to Parsiana by the company’s local distributor Keith Fernandes.

Ghaswala: health and beauty Photo: The Business Journal, Phoenix

The youngest of seven children educated in Karachi, she is an alumnus of St Xavier’s Commercial College who moved to Canada with her husband at the age of 25 and landed in Phoenix in 1977. It was at Del Webb Corporation that she joined Rex Maughan as executive assistant. When Maughan conceptualized and created health and beauty products focussing on aloe vera and left Del Webb to create Forever Living Products, Ghaswala followed even though she was "skeptical at first,” she told Robertson. She was convinced of the efficacy of aloe vera when it cleared up "her first baby’s relentless diaper rash,” notes Robert­son.

Initially the company operated from Tempe with manufacturing outsour­ced. In 1982 Mau­ghan bought a manufacturing plant in Dallas. It was also the time when aloe vera broke upon American consciousness. The company moved to Scottsdale in 1997. It has distributors in about 80 countries and a Forever Resorts division with locations in South Africa and Alaska. "It’s been an exciting ride. I’ve grown with the company,” Ghaswala told Robertson.

The Ghaswala family frequently travels together — to Europe, Tahiti, the Caribbean or to their country home in the White Mountains of Arizona. "I feel strongly that travel is very important. We try to relax,” she says.