India is poised to be the next home for new beauty conglomerates.
On Wednesday, the multi-brand beauty and personal company Good Glamm Group announced a $150 million Series D funding round co-led by tech and private equity investors Prosus Ventures and Warburg Pincus. This put the total valuation of the company at $1.2 billion. This news shortly follows the company’s announcement that it raised a Series C funding of $71.3 million between March and July, when Amazon and L’Occitane invested. Good Glamm Group will direct the latest funding to product development, data science, technology research, offline expansion and working capital requirements.
Darpan Sanghvi, founder and CEO of Good Glamm Group, built the direct-to-consumer makeup brand MyGlamm in 2017. MyGlamm merged with POPxo, an editorial site and community for millennial women, in Aug. 2020. Together, the brands became the Good Glamm Group. Throughout 2021, Good Glamm Group spent $270 million to acquire India-based influencer marketing platform Plixxo, parenting platform BabyChakra and men’s editorial site ScoopWhoop.
“The time has come for the next [beauty conglomerate],” said Sanghvi. “We believe the next big beauty and personal care group to come about will be the one that understands and owns the digital ecosystem required for consumers to discover and interact with these brands.”
Good Glamm Group reaches 150 million people across its brands and platforms in India. Using POPxo, which has 88 million annual users, the company’s portfolio brands receive added exposure, as the site acts as a top funnel to direct readers to brand websites via product placement. Social media exposure through the help of Plixxo’s 220,000 influencers and organic posts further drives sales. MyGlamm has more than 4 million customers and is available at over 20,000 digital and physical points of sale across India. According to Sanghvi, MyGlamm acquires, on average, 350,000 new customers every month. He added there are plans for international expansion in 2022, but declined to comment on a specific timeline.
Ad position: web_incontent_pos1
“We’ve created a flywheel ecosystem at scale,” said Priyanka Gill, My Glamm Group co-founder. “We get a lot of users through our content platforms, then we send them to our staple of brands that we own and convert our content users into buyers. Underlying all of this is our powerhouse of data that we’re sitting on.”
According to a presentation shared with Glossy, Good Glamm Group plans to acquire three different brands across personal care and skin care, in addition to a digital media company and at least two content creator platforms. My Glamm Group expects to earn $120 million in 2021 revenue, and plans to achieve a $250 million revenue run rate by March 2022, said Sanghvi.
India has been poised to become the next big beauty market for some time, as citizens’ expendable income has grown in step with its economy. According to a report from Israel’s Ministry of Economy and Industry, India’s beauty and personal care market expects to reach between $9.5 billion and $10.5 billion in 2021 sales. And public markets are taking notice: In August, the beauty and fashion retailer Nykaa, referred to as “India’s Sephora,” filed for an IPO. It will officially go public on Wednesday via the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange.
Ad position: web_incontent_pos2
“The penetration of beauty and personal care [in India] is among the lowest in the world. It was a market that was waiting to explode,” said Sanghvi. “Until recently, the brands available in India were older legacy brands. New consumers are hungry to discover other brands, and now the customer has a phone and access to the internet and social media.”
