The inspirational David Vs Golaith story of SUGAR Cosmetics

Adgully hosted the 3^rd edition of Women Disruptors Summit on March 3, 2022, which was attended by the most influential women leaders in business. The very inspirational opening keynote address was delivered by ‘Shark Tank’ fame Vineeta Singh, Founder & CEO, SUGAR Cosmetics, who spoke about why D2C brands are exploding and why it is going to be a massive opportunity for the next two decades.

Commencing her address, Singh said that she was often asked how SUGAR Cosmetics had the courage to compete with big legacy brands – from Unilever to PNG to L’oreal. “I think the answer to this is that we would never have thought about doing this. We started as an e-commerce company that was catering to the Millennial and GenZ women and beauty & personal care products was our thesis, because we were beginning to see that younger women used per capita a lot more beauty and personal care products than their moms, as they are stepping out, they are going to college, they are working, so they have more exposure to the external environment than women of the previous generation,” she said.

Continuing further, Singh said, “These women are actually at the heart of the launch of SUGAR, because they have 2-3 concerns about the brands that are available in the market.”

Enumerating these, Singh said that the first concern was that women wanted products that were extremely long lasting, that would last them from the morning when they stepped out to go to college or work, to night when they returned home, especially in the Indian tropical humid weather conditions and the pollution and public transport that they were taking, which were not very kind to their skin and face.

Secondly, women wanted a product that suited the Indian skin tones, including the warmest and deepest of skin tones. Thirdly, they wanted products that could quickly bring them the biggest global trends, but in a way that suited their Indian aesthetics.

“These were the challenges that our consumers threw at us before we launched SUGAR. We spent a long time studying these 200K women who were at the heart of our launch and we realised that there was an opportunity to create a young, data-driven new age beauty brand in the colour cosmetics category, which focused on Millennial and GenZ women.

This is an edited excerpt. For the complete address, watch below: