Good Glamm Group will be first global beauty company out of India in coming years: founder and CEO Darpan Sanghvi

New Delhi: Bouncing back from the challenges it faced during the lockdown, content-to-commerce unicorn The Good Glamm Group plans to enter the men’s grooming category this year, step into new markets overseas and "definitely" go for IPO in early 2025, says CEO Darpan Sanghvi.

At the same time, the company’s existing brands -- MyGlamm, Sirona, St Botanica, Organic Harvest, The Moms Co, and BabyChakra -- are significantly expanding their product offerings with new innovations and new category entries with products relevant to consumers.

"In the coming years, we see ourselves as the first global beauty company to come out of India with brands that are globally loved and leveraging our competitive advantage of Content Creator Commerce backed by technology and data," Sanghvi, who is also group founder, told PTI.

That said, 'good' things didn't come easy for The Good Glamm Group. In March 2020, as India went into a Covid-induced lockdown, MyGlamm, the beauty brand under Good Glamm Group, stared at a crisis.

"MyGlamm faced a challenging situation when India went into a lockdown due to the pandemic and the VC (venture capital) fund leading our Series C fundraise pulled out," Sanghvi recounted.

With USD 20 million worth of unsold inventory, additional payables of USD 5 million, and pending orders of another USD20 million, the brand was left with no money and no revenue due to the lockdown.

Determined to overcome the crisis, the brand first optimised expenses and reduced cash outflows, set up distribution channels in chemists and grocery stores and reached out to their existing investors for emergency capital.

Bold moves followed.

After receiving funds, it acquired POPxo, India's largest online community of women with 88 million women users, which increased the brand's digital reach. The brand also doubled down on its offline strategy growing offline point of sales from 500 to 10,000 during Covid, and launched a 3,000 sq ft flagship store located in Mumbai's Juhu neighbourhood.

"We also brought in actor Shraddha Kapoor on board as an investor and brand ambassador," Sanghvi said.

The big bets paid off.

With customer acquisition engines firing on all cylinders, funds flowing in (USD 100 million Series C funding round led by Accel, Amazon, Ascent, Trifecta), and acquisitions (POPxo, in August 2020, BabyChakra a year later and many since) yielding desired results, the company was ready for the next leap.

In November 2021, barely one and half years after being rocked by crisis, The Good Glamm Group entered the unicorn club with a valuation of about USD 1.2 billion after raising USD 150 million from Warburg Pincus and Prosus Ventures.

The group is built on a robust content-to-commerce strategy with acquisitions that have made it South Asia’s largest D2C (direct to consumer) conglomerate in the beauty and personal care segment, according to Sanghvi.

Last year, it unveiled its overall group structure consolidating The Good Glamm Group companies into independent brands, media and creator divisions: Good Brands Co, Good Media Co. and Good Creator Co. In Sanghvi’s view, the move reflects the group’s focus on unlocking structural efficiencies while building revenue synergies.

Recently, it added a fourth strategic moat - the Good Community, an omnichannel, interest-based network of communities across India.

"It is an industry-first move by the group in the brand-community space defining how direct-to-consumer brands of today can be scaled via engaged communities," Sanghvi said.

All though the digital journey, AWS has been a critical technology partner for The Good Glamm Group.

The goal is to stay ahead of the curve and keep a razor sharp eye on profitability. With this in mind, the group intends to introduce innovative formats and ingredients to the market in the makeup, personal care, and feminine hygiene categories over the next five years.

"Good Brands Co aims to establish the largest conglomerate of direct-to-consumer clean beauty brands in South Asia. The company is focused on scaling its brands through a D2C approach and gradually expanding into an omnichannel presence across all consumer shopping channels," explained Sukhleen Aneja, CEO of Good Brands Co, The Good Glamm Group.

This year, Aneja said, the group plans on entering the men’s grooming category with an "exciting" joint venture with Akshay Kumar.

"We also have global aspirations with plans to enter newer markets and which we began with UAE. The international division opens up new markets for the group’s brands," Sanghvi added.

"For FY 24, our focus is profitability following which, the next big thing for us is to definitely go for the IPO in early 2025." Sanghvi said the biggest growth driver is undoubtedly the Content Creator Community engine which has ensured that every brand it bought in 2021 has grown between 200 per cent to 400 per cent in the last year.

"This strategic moat is proprietary and allows us to cross sell every new brand to our existing base of customers. We today have 12 million transacted customers and a 12 month retention rate of 45-50 per cent. This high new user acquisition coupled with extremely strong repeat behaviour is what is fuelling our growth," he said.

Building a brand from the ground up or repositioning its strategy can be challenging and rewarding at the same time.

"Overall, building brands ground up or repositioning the strategy and working on the innovation pipeline can be a challenging but exciting process that requires a combination of strategic thinking, creativity, and adaptability," Aneja pointed out.

Today, The Good Glamm Group has grown into a comprehensive brand, media, creator and community conglomerate that operates in the beauty and personal care industries.

Aneja said the direct-to-consumer approach remains the primary focus, and "we rely on content-creator-community-commerce strategy to fuel our funnel".

"This is where the significant amount of content seeded through Good Creator Co and Good Media Co becomes vital as it provides us access to over 200 million active users every month," she said.

The fundamental operations rely on technology and digital infrastructure, which enhance efficiency.

"We have completely adopted public cloud providers for our digital infrastructure. Our utilisation of technologies such as CI/CD, Containers, NLP (natural language processing), machine learning, generative AI (artificial intelligence), and others aid in supporting our current operations while also preparing us for future scaling and expansion plans," Aneja said.

Its cloud services are exclusively provided by AWS, and depend on its numerous essential services.

"Throughout our digital journey, AWS has been a critical technology partner for us. By utilising a range of AWS services, we have implemented a highly efficient, dependable, and easily scalable solution in record time, allowing us to expand our operations with great efficiency," Aneja said.

(This story has been produced by PTI in collaboration with Amazon Web Services).