SUGAR Cosmetics was launched in 2012 by Vineeta Singh. Starting as a direct-to-consumer (D2C) cosmetics brand, it has now built an omnichannel distribution network that includes over 2,500 retail outlets across more than 130 cities. It is currently garnering Rs 45 crore of monthly sales. In the color cosmetics category, SUGAR is the third-largest brand in the Indian market with a 6 percent market share.

Inception

Vineeta launched a company almost 10 years back as a beauty subscription business. At that time, she didn’t have any clarity that the subscription business is going to be a disaster and it was not going to scale.

“Sometimes you build a model which turns out to be too complex for the consumers, and that’s what happened with our subscription-based company. It was impossible to scale that business, and that’s how SUGAR was born. Also, building something for women and by women has always been my passion project, and that’s how SUGAR came around,” Vineeta Singh, Co-Founder, and CEO, SUGAR Cosmetics said.

One of the big shifts that the brand has seen is the increasing number of online women shoppers. Earlier, less than 10 percent of the e-commerce shoppers were women, but today that number is at 43 percent, and this entire shift has been observed in the last seven years.

Going the D2C Way

When the brand launched its D2C website, D2C was not a buzz concept back then. Before D2C became important, SUGAR figured out that launching its own website and app would be lucrative. At that time, people were skeptical and asked why somebody would download a single brand app. But SUGAR made its app and website lucrative enough by adding a lot of content wherein consumers were able to figure out what products would work better for them using AR filters. The brand got more than a million downloads within the first 12 months of launching its app because its app was fun and easy to use.

“Our D2C channel gave us a million opportunities to fail because we try hundred new things, of which, 5 work while 95 don't work. For instance, the large FMCC companies ask consumers what they want. But many times the consumer doesn't know what he/she wants. So the real proof of the pudding is in them spending their hard-earned money and women will spend their hard-earned money only when they're very convinced that the product is good. So, our entire D2C channel became an opportunity for us to fail a million times and experiment with different products. We figured out a process wherein we launch multiple products on our D2C channel and let consumers decide what they like. Once our experimentation is completed, we get our hero products which are more desired by the consumers and then we send out those products to other channels,” she asserted.

D2C is excellent because it lets the brand experiment. So, SUGAR does some unique launches that are only for online consumers.

Making Women Feel Special

Makeup is one of those things that give women confidence. SUGAR wanted to create products that lasted and made them unstoppable because, for women, makeup made them feel great about themselves and made them feel unstoppable. 

“We felt that the makeup products had to be right for them, including for women with the deepest and the warmest of skin tones. And you would not believe that seven years back, the most mainstream brands wouldn’t create products for women that had my skin tone, and definitely not anybody who had skin tones that were deeper. Therefore, we focused on that segment, and today 60 percent of my business is coming from this region in the country where the skin tone is this,” Singh stated.

The brand launched India’s first long-lasting matte lipstick, which was in a liquid format. Back then, consumer dissonance was something that everybody thought would be unacceptable, but the fact that it would stay put for 8-12 hours made it one of the best products. “There were five products we launched back in 2015-16, and they still give us 40 percent of our business because these are our hero products and once you discover them, they will continue to grow exponentially,” she added.

READ MORE: How SUGAR is Pushing Both Offline & Online Frontiers

Building a Community

Education is very core in the makeup business and it was happening for many years in stores where women were being taught how to wear makeup and then being sold makeup according to their skin type. Now that entire piece of education is shifting online. Education is core to SUGAR’s category and one of the biggest things that the brand has been able to build is a community, where people want to spend time, learn, and also make an effort to engage through the brand’s content.

“We don’t have any agency for influencer marketing or creating content; everything is done by our in-house team. We are the fastest-growing brand on both YouTube and Instagram. With 2 million followers on Instagram and 500,000 on YouTube, we get more than 4 billion impressions a year. This following has not come with money; this only comes with authentically creating content every single day that the consumer wants to spend time watching,” Singh concluded.