How India’s MyGlamm found DTC success

MyGlamm’s experiential beauty flagship sits in Mumbai’s bustling Juhu neighborhood. Inside, a range of makeup and skin-care brands, including MyGlamm’s own products, lines up across large mirrors. There are dedicated “influencer” spaces designed to help create the perfect Instagrammable moment—plus “makeover” desks and a newly designed manicure station.

But the 3,000-square-foot space, which opened in 2021, is a small (and recent) addition to MyGlamm’s success story.

• It has 40,000 points-of-sale across India, according to the brand.

Offline is ~35% of the beauty company’s revenue (MyGlamm says it has a $100 million annual run rate), while e-comm—given its DTC beginnings in 2017—“is thriving,” founder Darpan Sanghvi told Retail Brew.

Back up: With the rise of online shopping, India’s DTC market has been growing—and it could reach $100 billion by 2025, according to financial services firm Avendus Capital. Beauty brands, especially, are poised to benefit, said Triveni Kulkarni, a senior research analyst at Mintel.

“Post the liberalization of the economy in the early ‘90s, rising disposable incomes of the urban middle class have resulted in bigger budgets on discretionary spends such as beauty,” she told us in an email. “And with global exposure through social media, there is a consumer demand today for international trends with respect to skin care and makeup.”

For a while, the category was dominated by the likes of Nykaa, an e-commerce beauty platform that was founded in 2012. (It’s still a major player today, and is looking to expand its offline business.)

Sanghvi wanted to differentiate MyGlamm by “own[ing] the customer” and facilitating transactions through its own platform, he said.

• The Mumbai-based company invested in building out tech that would “capture customer data to segment them correctly, to understand them better, and create products that are more relevant for them,” Sanghvi noted.

Today, 80% of MyGlamm customers fall between the ages of 16 and 35 and are spread across Tier 1, 2, and 3 cities. And its price points match up accordingly: The products, ranging from eye cream to highlighters, cost between 199 Indian rupees ($2.60) for the “entry-level” younger consumer and 1,200 rupees ($16) for higher-end products.

“The gap we wanted to bridge was creating products that are personalized to the wants and needs of women,” Sanghvi said in an email. “We wanted to establish a beauty democracy by giving consumers the power to tell the brand what they want, thus changing the entire experience of how women buy beauty products in India and getting women to actively participate in the creation of products that address specific beauty needs that they have.”

While MyGlamm’s 12-month customer-retention rate was close to 50%, according to Sanghvi, “the biggest challenge” was customer-acquisition costs—which ran up to $15 per shopper.

• “On Amazon and Nykaa, the customers already existed, you just needed to get yourself in front of them,” he explained. “Trying to get traffic to the MyGlamm website and the app, that’s what I was spending a lot of my money on.”

Fast-forward: In 2020, MyGlamm acquired Popxo, an Indian digital-content platform for millennial women, along with Plixxo, an influencer-marketing platform—both founded by Priyanka Gill. (Terms of the deal were not disclosed.) By joining forces with Gill, who was also struggling to “monetize [Popxo’s] reach effectively,” MyGlamm would get access to the platform’s 60 million users, who were mostly women already interested in makeup and skincare.

“[Darpan and I] had this very kind of long, two-hour engaging call, where we both realized that we actually wanted to solve the same puzzle, which was content to commerce,” Gill told us. “Because marketing was a big pain point for the DTC business, and I wanted to solve that because monetizing was a big pain point for the content business.”

Within six months of acquiring Popxo and Plixxo, MyGlamm’s monthly active users on its website doubled from 30,000 to 60,000, according to the company. A year later, it was clocking 350,000 new customers every month, and customer acquisition rates today have dropped to less than a dollar, according to Gill and Sanghvi.

On to the next: This “content to commerce” strategy has only accelerated with recent acquisitions of Baby Chakra, a digital parenting platform—that counts 20 million young mothers as part of its community—founded by Naiyya Saggi.

• It also snapped up ScoopWhoop, a digital media platform aimed at men; MissMalini Entertainment, an entertainment new-media network; and a majority stake in Organic Harvest, a skin-care and hair-care brand.

Together, they now form The Good Glamm Group, which houses three different verticals—covering personal care, beauty, and media brands, each with an established presence within the country.

Sanghvi, Gill, and Saggi, who are the firm’s co-founders, all agreed that the company’s rapid success lies in partnerships, whose combined reach has helped it build a community of 1.5 million influencers and 4.5 billion monthly impressions online, according to Sanghvi.

“The secret sauce is that our monetization comes from our brands that we own, and we’re able to leverage that to continue to invest in our creator companies and our media content companies to grow their scale,” Sanghvi said. “They’re incredible enablers for our DTC content to commerce strategy.”

Looking ahead…After scoring $150 million in funding last November, The Good Glamm Group is now a unicorn, valued at $1.2 billion. Next steps include a possible IPO, plus expanding the brand beyond India in the second half of the year, starting with the Middle East.

“At some point in 2022, IPO is the natural path for us,” Sanghvi said. “In the next 18 to 24 months, our target is to hit a $1 billion cross-revenue run rate. At that point we should be significantly cash-generative positively.”