Beauty disruptor: India’s MyGlamm to invest in NPD, data and offline after funding boost - CEO

The direct-to-consumer (DTC) beauty brand closed an INR175Cr (USD24.2) Series C funding round with investments from Ascent Capital, Amazon and Wipro Consumer, it announced on March 18.

With this fresh round of funding, the company is now valued at more than USD100m, just three years after its launch in 2017.

“We are really excited that we will be able to learn from both Amazon and Wipro Consumer along with the financial rigour that Ascent Capital brings as we move forward to fulfil our vision of building India’s largest beauty company leveraging DTC, digital, and data,” ​said Darpan Sanghvi, founder and CEO, MyGlamm.

Sanghvi told CosmeticsDesign-Asia​ that it was aiming to go against India’s largest beauty and personal care companies. “We feel we are best suited to come in and disrupt everything leveraging on digital.”​

As part of its bold plans, the company will be expanding its portfolio of products to maximise the consumers’ share of wallet. According to Sanghvi, 76% of its repeat customers buy more than one category from the company.

“What you will see this year is skin care, personal care, body care and hair care, getting fully developed and expanded out. We've already launched skin care and personal care, but we're looking to go deeper in there. We are also launching hair care in the next couple of months,”​ said Sanghvi.

‘The goldmine’

The funding would also support the company’s research and development into data science and technology.

In August 2020, MyGlamm acquired the digital content platform POPxo. This partnership enabled the company to tap into a huge pool of beauty consumers to develop co-created products, which Sanghvi believes is the future of product development​ for the company.

“When POPxo-Plixxo was acquired by MyGlamm in August 2020, Darpan and I laid out an ambitious roadmap. Not only did we meet our goals ahead of plan but we surpassed them,” ​said Priyanka Gill, co-founder and president, MyGlamm.

Gill believes that this access is a huge advantage that MyGlamm has over the established brands in as well as newer DTC brands in India.

“As POPxo, we throw a lot of content at our users and when she interacts with all these pieces of content, we get a lot of information back from her – this is basically the goldmine that we are sitting on.”​

Gil said it was this information that informed the company’s decision to expand into the hair care category.

“Hair care is very important, but we’re not saying that because it's how we feel. We say so because we have large amounts of data that we have actually gone out to collect. That’s what’s told us that hair care is a very viable line to get into.”​

With this data, the platform is also able to make very specific product recommendations based on a user’s emotional state-of-mind.

“Imagine if you have a girl that constantly engaging with content about breakups. What kind of products would she want at that point? Most likely, we would recommend fun make-up product that would perk her up a bit. Just by looking at what the user is doing, we are able to create cohorts based on that. Just by certain actions, like the kind of content she’s reading, we are able to push her down a certain funnel,” ​explained Gil.

A bigger offline footprint

Last November, the company unveiled its first standalone experiential retail store​, which it described as a ‘beauty playground’ with make-up minibars, a lounge as well as content creation booths with photo and video capabilities.

In addition to the flagship, the company has 10,000 point-of-sales and the company has an aggressive plan to expand its offline presence.

“Being omnichannel is super critical to building a meaningful brand.​ We are a multi-category brand, so our shelf space is far greater than any other brand. We now have 10,000 point-of-sales. By September we should have 25,000 point-of-sales and by December we should have 35,000,” ​said Sanghvi.

While the firm has been approached to take the brand overseas, it will be focusing primarily on the domestic market in the near future to hit the ambitious financial goals it has set for itself.

“We have aggressively revised our growth targets. Earlier, for December 2021, we wanted to hit a revenue run rate of about $70m. Now we’re looking at about $85m to $90m. We want to get those numbers in India first. I think we will seriously look at [overseas expansion] towards the end of the year once we achieve our revenue targets in India.”​