The Question Girl of Business

March
14, 2021

3 min read through

Viewpoints expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their possess.

You happen to be reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

VINEETA SINGH, Co-founder & CEO, SUGAR Cosmetics

Soon after studying Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras, Vineeta Singh went to B-School at IIM Ahmedabad before commencing her entrepreneurial journey. Sharing more on her startup spirit, Singh suggests, “I normally felt strongly about building anything with women as the core client, so when my initial startup didn’t scale, I determined to launch a beauty subscription firm with my co-founder, Kaushik, in 2012. The 200,000 women who shared their comprehensive splendor tastes with us have been at the coronary heart of our pivot to SUGAR Cosmetics, which introduced as a direct-to-customer make-up model in 2015.” When SUGAR introduced quality quality, lengthy-lasting makeup with shades for India, the brand name grew virally as a result of ladies speaking about it on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. When the early adopters for SUGAR were additional electronic-savvy, functioning girls living in metros, they now see a good deal of youthful, millennial females in the 20 to 35 age group throughout India, including Tier 2/3/4 cities, aspiring to own SUGAR goods.

When SUGAR was launched, massive legacy brand names by no means deemed e-commerce and social media as significant potential profits and marketing channels, so Singh felt that they weren’t ready for the youthful, new India. Talking about the preliminary troubles, Singh mentions, “When we tried raising money, we had been told that digital-first attractiveness will be a tiny industry and that it would be unattainable to compete with big FMCG firms with no elevating hundreds of tens of millions of pounds. We were being even advised that the merchandise by itself won’t be a solid moat considering that it is a commodity.”

Such as their most recent Series C funding of $21 Million, to date, the firm has lifted a overall of $33 Million from Elevation Funds, A91 Partners, India Quotient, RB Investments, and some others. SUGAR Cosmetics has marketed additional than 15 million products to day and at present sells all around 650,000 products just about every thirty day period. Its app has extra than 1 million downloads, and its Instagram site has 1.1 million followers and each individual thirty day period their whole engagement on social media is 250 million. With a retail footprint across 130+ towns in 10,000+ retail shops, they have achieved an yearly turnover operate amount of INR 200 crore. Their offline channels consist of distinctive brand name outlets, counters in massive official retail chains. The aim is to improve from 10,000 outlets to 40,000+ in the following 12-18 months though growing app downloads from 1 mn to 4 mn customers.

This year on International Women’s Working day, the magnificence brand launched its first-at any time merchandise collaboration, the SUGAR X Ponder Female selection soon after buying the rights from Warner Bros. Media for a interval of 1 year from the launch.

 “Since most of our retail customers started shopping us online, this really aided us recover to pre covid levels by September and by November 2020, we experienced bouced to 150% of pre covid concentrations.”

(This post was 1st revealed in the March 2021 issue of Entrepreneur Journal. To subscribe, click listed here)