Organic Products – Dutch Uncles

Why the Love for Vegan Brands is On the Rise Especially Among Youngsters?

Shalmoli Sarkar — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 08:33:40 +0000

One day, a video surfaced on social media that became viral within seconds of its release. The video showed the brutality that animals endure in the processed meat industries, dairy and beauty, and cosmetics industries. When it comes to the growth of vegan brands in India, social media has fuelled the growth of the vegan market in India where content on animal cruelty and animal rights videos were most shared and liked by the youngsters.

Also, what pushed veganism more is the breakout of the pandemic that made people fearful of the zoonotic diseases emerging from animals and low antibiotic resistance. A report from Barclays says that the vegan food and drink market could increase by 1000 percent by the end of this decade and a report from Franchise India Holdings Limited finds that the number of vegan consumers in India has risen by 360 percent from the past decade.

Vegan cosmetic consumption in India is also not behind vegan food consumption. After people came to know the brutal trials the animals undergo especially rabbits, mice, guinea pigs, and rats, people have shown an inclination towards vegan cosmetics. Also, cosmetics since are not to be tested on animals, and directly to humans, it is likely that ingredients used in cosmetics should be skin-friendly, organic, and plant-based resulting in the least skin irritations.

According to a recent report from Brand Essence, the clean beauty market in India was valued at $5439.6 million in 2020 and is expected to reach $ 11558.5 in 2027 growing at a CAGR of 12.07 percent. The use of organic, sulphate- free and plant-based ingredients has given birth to several D2C beauty and skincare brands that witnessed 3 times growth in revenue in 2021.

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According to a recent report from Brand Essence, the clean beauty market in India was valued at $5439.6 million in 2020 and is expected to reach $ 11558.5 in 2027 growing at a CAGR of 12.07 percent.

The vegan brands that are witnessing an uptick in demand

Plum an online cosmetic vegan brand founded in 2014, receives over 10,000 shipments every month and has over 35 SKUs ranging from Rs 335 to Rs 575, and monthly adds 4000 new customers every month.

Vegan Bites – a vegan tiffin service based out of Mumbai delivers 250 tiffins across the city everyday and has an annual turnover of Rs 2 crore. Their food is enjoyed by patients suffering from heart ailments and diabetes.

Vegan dairy i.e. dairy products that do not involve cow or buffalo milk is a boon for the lactose intolerant. Not just that, but vegan milk helps manage a weight that lowers their cholesterol levels, minimises heart risks, and reduces the risk of PCOD in younger women. Vegan milk brands like Urban Platter and GoodMylk are offering unsweetened almond milk, soya milk, coconut milk and peanut curd, vegan butter, vegan mayonnaise respectively. The products are highly demanded since the product is fortified with high protein and gives 40 percent more calcium than regular dairy milk.

Blush Bee beauty, a brand of ‘clean beauty’ cosmetics that develops beauty products for, faces and eyes completely made of natural ingredients and expects to grow annually by 5 percent in the next five years.

The future of vegan cosmetics and food in India

There has been an increased emphasis on ethical consumerism that is fuelling the growth of vegan brands be it food or cosmetics. According to data from Market Research Future cruelty-free cosmetics is set to increase 6.1 percent between 2017-2023.

For vegan food brands, though nascent in India but are growing. Customers are looking for alternatives to meat-based products. Consumers are aware of the importance of living a healthy lifestyle, healthy diet, and harmful health effects of consuming red meat for a prolonged period, which will drive vegan behaviour amongst consumers. According to Expert Market Research, the Indian vegan food market is being supported by the growth of the overall global vegan food market, which attained a value of USD 15.4 billion in 2020. The global vegan food market is further expected to grow in the forecast period of 2022-2027 at a CAGR of 26%.

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Taru Naturals, Mumbai’s Social Entrepreneur Brings Another Green Revolution

DU Desk — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 03:34:22 +0000

Taru Naturals, a company working with small scale farmers and 10,000 tribal communities across India. Encouraging age-old wisdom and sustainable agricultural practice, Taru Naturals, a start-up company, aims to establish market linkages for farmers. Founded in 2016 by a Mumbai-based entrepreneur Ruchi Jain, it ensures a steady source of income, and also brings farm fresh organic products to our tables.

Taru Naturals was among the three India-based enterprises that won UN’s global competition of ‘Best Small Businesses’. By providing inspiring, diverse and impactful solutions for improving access to healthy and sustainable food, the start-up gained a lot of popularity.

Taru Natural’s Development Model

The company’s development model includes a complete process of sourcing and distributing.

At first, a leader within the farming community is identified as a point of contact. Farmer meetings are held for future training sessions.
Farmers are then trained for three days on regenerative farming, agriculture business models, marketing, value addition, farming techniques. Along with technical training they are also taught leadership skills, resilience, meditation, yoga, nutrition and health.
The farmers are then assessed on the basis of their training and learning and then the documentation and information for organic is collected. All the certification procedures are done by Taru executives.
Post the training programme, community leaders start working with farmers and brief them about sustainable agriculture practices. The farmers are made aware of the mobile technology and are taught how to use a smartphone.
Market linkages are built and monthly stakeholder meetings are conducted for follow ups.
Slowly the procedure moves towards making farmers independent by doing various activities and making them aware of the climate adaptation, agriculture business models, self-sufficiency, community living, etc.
At the final stage of the development model a farmer producer organisation is established for the farmers group to get an on-ground experience of scaling their market and coordinate the supply chain.

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Taru Naturals not only focuses on sourcing organic products but also connects the small-scale farmers with the market and empower them to earn a steady income.

How Taru Naturals is Bringing Green Revolution?

The entrepreneurial goal of Taru Naturals is to promote sustainable living and bring a change in the society. By empowering and safeguarding the small-scale farmer communities, the start-up has already achieved many of the sustainable development goals.

The organic food market has seen a rise in the market over the past few years. This has led restaurants to collaborate with firms like Taru Naturals and zama organics to bring the fresh food and staples on the table. Taru Naturals partnered with Cafe Zoe and made the organic products affordable for the masses. By building a farmers’ market and providing farmers with resources and technology to enable organic farming, the start-up is bringing another green revolution in India.

Projects and Product Line

Taru Naturals initiated Project My Organic Gurukul to incorporate a healthy and sustainable way of living as part of their education curriculum. Under this project young minds are taught about the core values of nurturing, nature, resilience, sustainability, and compassion. The project is a step towards providing a healthy, organic, and sustainable future with Taru products.

The start-up’s product line includes sweeteners, whole grains, pulses and millets, heirloom rice, spices and herbs, oils, nuts, seeds and ghees, premium flours, breakfast flakes, cereals and mixes (as Taru Breakfast), immunity boosting teas, jams and honeys, and much more. It also deals in kitchen garden essentials for keeping your garden organic and pesticide free.

Insights For Other Startups in This Space

Startups in the organic farming space should take away a major quality of promoting sustainable living from Taru Naturals. It not only focuses on sourcing organic products but also connects the small-scale farmers with the market and empower them to earn a steady income. The start-up focuses on educating the farmers and making them smartphone ready. Taru Naturals is building a self-sufficient value chain ecosystem for farm produce, interfering with climate resilient agriculture practices, clean post-harvest technology and value-added products.

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Teabox Innovating How Tea is Sold in India

Vaishali Das — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 04:29:39 +0000

The most generally consumed refreshment on the planet close to water, Tea is still to a great extent produced and distributed much as it was two centuries ago, often at the expense of freshness. Teabox, a Siliguri-based startup catering to a worldwide market of tea lovers by bringing the fresh tea leaves straight from the estates to the consumer in no time.

About Teabox and Its Specialty

By fusing tea with technology, Kaushal Dugar, founder and CEO of Teabox, is transforming the practices around tea production and distribution. It brings the freshness of tea leaves straight from the farm to the consumer’s cup within days after it is picked. The startup majorly focuses on providing customers with more approachable ways to explore different varieties, regions, and flavours of tea just like wine.

The startup deals on the vertical integration of sourcing, branding, and distribution of teas. By infusing family’s teachings of the old tea trade with technology and new ways of doing business, Kaushal Dugar created India’s first global tea brand.

Best Quality and Marketing Strategy

Teabox’s major source of producing tea is from Darjeeling, Assam, Nilgiris in Tamilnadu and Nepal. It took the basic idea of using the online platform for selling tea as it is done for coffee and wines. This strategy aimed to reduce the time from production to consumption and hence provides tea in its purest form without any intermediaries. With having over 200 variants of tea including Punjabi masala and Kolkata Street chai, the startup is very famous at an international level, amongst the coffee drinking market.

The startup took the inspiration from the rich and visual history of tea production, including the colonial-era typography that is still very much prevalent in tea crates. The simplicity of the Teabox website lies in its accessibility with easy-to-use format, quickly giving out information about the incredible range of teas. Teabox also provides its consumers with the opportunity to select their own tea combinations by taking up its subscriptions.

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The simplicity of the Teabox website lies in its accessibility with easy-to-use format, quickly giving out information about the incredible range of teas.

What Differentiates Teabox from the others in the Market?

Teabox is a direct-to-consumer e-commerce tea startup that cuts down the supply chain and makes it a simpler and faster process.

It uses a fairly straightforward model of sourcing the highest quality tea directly from the tea estates and delivering it to the consumers within 5-7 business days.
The startup has an in-built software that maps every step from procurement of tea from the tea estate to delivering it to the customer.
Providing customers with a subscription-based service where they can taste different varieties before settling on their favorites is another great strategy.
They also provide customers with “TeaPacs”, transforming a 50-year-old invention of tea bags. Unlike teabags, TeaPacs are infused with nitrogen gas to keep tea fresh as much as possible.
Its modern and minimalistic packaging includes loose tea leaves well preserved with natural nitrogen flush that locks down the freshness of the leaves.

Insights For Startups in the Tea Selling Space

As the industry has picked up a substantial raise in the lockdown, tea has become the healthier beverage with antiviral properties. The use of a digital platform for selling tea, Teabox, has created a niche for buyers, providing them a brand-new experience of ordering and tasting a variety of teas.

Teabox also educates customers through its platform providing them knowledge about the specialty teas in India and giving the valued customers a chance of ‘experiential’ tea-drinking, a shift from the traditional way of tea consumption.

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How WOW Skin Science created the ‘WOW’ factor in its brand?

Khushi Singh — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 12:35:05 +0000

Fortune is in the failure. When WOW Skin Science hit an estimated valuation of $3.7 Billion, the world changed for these friends-turned-co-founders – Aravind Sokke, Ashwin Sokke, Karan Chowdhary and Manish Chowdhary, who rose from the ashes in 2016 with their venture’s inception.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts” – Winston Churchill

This famous saying fits aptly on the quartet, which took their second plunge into entrepreneurship with Bengaluru-based personal care brand WOW (Wealth of Wellness) Skin Science. The success of this start-up is even more inspiring since it grew out of the failure of the founder’s first venture in retail business in 2012. Finding motivation after a start-up’s failure is a challenge, which the co-founders managed to overcome.

Their offline retail business in laptops and electronics went for a toss after the emergence of deep discounts by e-commerce portals. With a swollen loss pool of over $1 million, the founders finally decided to shut down the business for good, collecting nothing but a few lessons. One of the most important one being – pivoting at the right time.

Bringing WOW to Life

Aiming to turn their misfortune into gains, the founders began with a plan to start a niche in a new segment. During that time, there were barely any affordable organic personal care brands for the general public. It was an open market with not many competitors providing economical products.

After putting a final stamp on ‘Beauty and Wellness’ as their area of focus, the four friends pooled in their combined savings to start Fit & Glow, the mother brand, in 2016.

Banking on their past lessons, the founders kept their focus intact on product quality and travelled around the globe to meet up with scientists and skincare experts to bring out a mix between traditional therapeutic formulations and scientific developments.

They wanted to perfect the product before bringing it out in the market and strengthen their product’s USP. After intensive research and experimentation, WOW, a Direct-to-Consumer brand, was launched.

WOW was started as an exclusive online brand with its own website besides marking its presence on digital shopping platforms.

Cashing on the ‘Vegan, Ayurvedic and Natural’ Wave

New-age consumers are constantly looking for newer formulations and healthy variants. There has been an increasing consciousness about using sustainable, nature-based products and WOW tapped on that opportunity.

Modern-day consumers are more aware and conscious about the products they associate themselves with in terms of their origin and socially attached stance. Hence, the WOW brand focused on creating a line that only relies on natural bio-active ingredients, free from any artificial additives.

At the time WOW was launched, there was little to no business footprint that delivered such products. The wave of curating nature-based products came a few years later with start-up brands like NatHabit and MamaEarth cashing in on the same while the already existing ones like Biotique and Lotus expanded their offerings under natural products. Besides, older brands like Khadi went aggressive on their digital presence and marketing.

Interestingly, this ‘all-natural, sustainable’ tag is not only used by beauty and skincare start-up brands, but also by international ones. The global natural skincare products market, valued at $10.84 Billion in 2019, is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5% from 2020 to 2027, as per a report by Grand View Research. With the space getting crowded with both new-age and established brands, the differentiating factor will remain on how businesses sell the ‘natural’ narrative besides the quality. The exclusivity factor in terms of ingredients will also matter.

Speaking about WOW products, the term ‘nature-powered formulations’ is used by the brand, which puts them neither in the traditional Ayurvedic category nor in the modern scientific formulas based ventures. It’s a blend of both, which brings in the exclusivity factor.

The company paid attention to the look and feel of the brand to keep the aesthetics right. Selling a product is like storytelling. You need to convey the message better to make that sale.

WOW has kept its products very sober yet innovative. Special attention has been paid to retain the texture and feel of natural ingredients to boost the overall user experience.

With an understanding of woke consumerism and correct implementation of these inputs, WOW has established itself as the go-to brand for the modern-urban conscious consumers looking for a holistic solution to their beauty and wellness needs.

The look and feel are unorthodox unlike most of the other naturally infused brands such as Dabur or Emami, giving WOW the edge. This is the main USP of the brand and its biggest selling point. The company also introduced add-ons like attached brushes and applicators, which set the products apart and led to at least first-time conversions out of sheer curiosity.

WOW’s success as a brand can also be credited to the e-commerce revolution. They entered the D2C space at the most opportune time and availed themselves of the success of e-commerce in India right when it started. Without the launchpad that the internet is, it would have taken 15 years for a brand like it to create the same impact among consumers using the traditional offline format.

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The company paid attention to the look and feel of the brand to keep the aesthetics right.

Affordability is the Key!

The brand’s success is majorly credited to its affordability, which skyrocketed the sales. A majority of WOW products are priced under Rs 500, bringing in the urban middle class under its target audience net. This is coupled with online shopping discounts.

Take, for instance, the WOW Apple Cider Vinegar shampoo, which was sold at Rs 299 as compared to other products in the same category costing about Rs 1400. This has amassed a huge user base for a single product and spurted sales. Later on, the prices were strategically increased to Rs 399. Apple Cider Vinegar shampoo’s success inspired the creation of an entire product line with the same formulation including face cream, face wash, hair mask, snack and tonics. To date, it is the most sold product from WOW on Amazon, both in India and the US.

Competitive pricing is one of the biggest reasons WOW has been able to seep into the market besides product exclusivity and quality. The key to their success is often credited to millennials and generation-z looking for a change outside the big skincare brand names and increased access to naturally-made products.

Towards Global Domination

There is a great market for natural Indian products globally and WOW wanted to cash in on the same. It wouldn’t be completely wrong to say that the tags of Yoga, Ayurveda, all-natural, vegan, cruelty-free, etc. sell faster today than it did a few years back.

The company started in the global market under Amazon Global Selling in 2016. Although the brand was relatively new in the US, it enjoyed a good acceptance in the foreign market. This can be understood with the recent increase in consciousness around consuming organic and plant-based products as a lifestyle choice.

In order to strengthen its base, WOW launched an entire line of personal and healthcare products after acquiring the rights for ‘Justice League’ by Warner Bros Media in 2020. This licensing deal helped the brand to add a sensational value to their product ranges as it opened up an entirely new segment of target audiences, especially kids.

Another important thing to mention here is that WOW kept a finger on the pulse of what different regions expect. For instance, the ACV Shampoo & Conditioner launched in the US market was kept the same in terms of formula and bottle size as in India. However, while the quality was appreciated, the quantity was not. The size was simply not large enough for the State’s market. Thus the 500ml bottle was born for the company’s American customers.

The brand has registered an 18x growth rate in the last four years in this particular segment. In India, the business has grown over 170% per cent in the last year, while in the US the growth percentage is 370%. These figures are remarkable considering the value conscious markets.

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Competitive pricing is one of the biggest reasons WOW has been able to seep into the market besides product exclusivity and quality.

Marketing 101

Since its inception, the company kept a sharp focus on long-term marketing and brand-building initiatives. The idea was to target potential customers through social media and digital marketing and the start-up took an aggressive route for the same.

The narrative decided for the brand is natural, scientific and environment conscious. Although affordable, the overall look and feel are kept very minimal yet luxurious.

Video advertisements were majorly used to capture attention. These videos by WOW are educational about their product range and easy to understand, along with being visually pleasing. Once the users interact with these videos or visit the website, the re-marketing concept is used to attract them wherein they are shown WOW products repeatedly whenever possible on multiple platforms. Besides, it also engages in various brand engagement activities like giveaways, which keeps the momentum going.

The result of this extensive digital marketing has been such that Amit Agarwal, Amazon India Head, went on record to designate WOW as one of its most successful brands among all its sellers. Digital demand alone has boosted the sales of WOW products by over $1 Million a month.

Presently the brand has signed two Bollywood actresses — Disha Patani for their haircare range and Bhumi Pednekar for their skincare range — as their brand ambassadors. This is coupled with its social media influencers tie-ups. The company forged an alliance with PVR in Tamil Nadu, the biggest market for the brand, as a part of its PR activation campaign. This was done with hoardings across Mumbai, New Delhi, Punjab, Chennai, Surat, Goa and parts of Karnataka.

The brand’s communication is focused on the generic issues faced by the consumers, like hair fall, among others. According to Madhur Acharya, WOW’s head of marketing, the brand will do more of ‘Out of home advertising’ (OOH) and print media, along with aggressively advertising on digital. They also plan to do some offline activations with start-ups like Ola and Uber, along with focusing on advertising in offline spaces, like airports, public transports, etc. It is yet to explore television.

For WOW, product quality supremacy is essential. For any company, advertisements could attract potential customers but the re-sale or its retention depends on the effectiveness of their products. This is one of the reasons WOW kept a strong focus on the quality.
Presently the brand has over 200 product variants with formulations, created specifically for niche consumer groups.

Going Offline and Official!

The brand is laying focus on off-line presence moving forward. The founders believe that in order to become a truly established brand, it is mandatory to have a strong offline presence as well.

Data collected through artificial intelligence from online sales is expected to help in replicating the same growth offline. The company has already started selling their personal care products at over 5000 pharmacies and stores.

The ultimate goal is to set up dedicated official stores across the country. The company remained self-funded till 2021. Recently, ChrysCapital invested $50 Million in the company for a minority stake. The anticipated strategy is to help WOW grow multi-folds by further deepening online penetration, pan-India offline expansion and coming up with new brands in relative categories.

The beauty and wellness segment is expanding and the competition is intensifying. The Ayurvedic-Scientific market is relatively new and hence open for all. Mamaearth, which started out at the same time as WOW in 2015, is the biggest competitor. With similar product range, pricing and business model, the two brands are constantly curating better products and looking for an edge to pin down each other. Other new competitors are MCaffeine, Amway and Body and Bath.

WOW has been able to maintain an upper hand through its well-established reputation and niche product range so far. It is twice the size of any of their competitors owing to their vast product range. Both in terms of quantity and price point, WOW is surely ruling the roost.

With revenue of Rs 350 crore in FY20, it is one of the most successful D2C brands in India with ample lessons for entrepreneurs to learn – right from the perfect implementation of digital marketing strategies to intensive market research, to creating an unbeatable product range and impeccable consumer services.

The do’s and don’ts are here. We hope yours becomes a bigger success story and all of us say – WOW!

The post How WOW Skin Science created the ‘WOW’ factor in its brand? appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

The Skincare Disruptor: Mamaearth

Suresh Chouksey — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 07:42:36 +0000

The booming Indian cosmetic market is welcoming all different kinds of players with open arms. There are skin care brands that are trying to act like a niche for a specific gender, while others are still battling the case of who’s better placed to take care of the ‘Indian’ skin type. The beauty industry widens its acceptance of trends per the openness in society itself. If the narrative is ready to shun racist advertising and labelling, it will swing that way and adjust. Till it wasn’t called out, ‘fairness’ products were a normal category on the shelf. For new ideas that are more authentically designed, keeping in mind customer’s well-being to shore, an awakened sense of beauty has to preside. As per the millennial age term, the ‘wokeness’ of the crowd can only make the space for such a brand or gives an opportunity to explore one. This is where a brand like Mamaearth found its footing.

The brand shone out of a problem that a couple first faced, then identified and went on to diagnose with a business solution. A brand originating out of personal experiences led to problem-solving often serve their purpose well and truly.

Founded by Varun Alagh and Ghazal Alagh, Mamaearth is a beauty and personal care brand. Back in 2016, the couple was expecting the good news to arrive their way. Like every other parent to be, they were trying to figure out the best of baby care products that they’ll be using. From what should be done to what can be avoided, they were scrounging the internet for all the tips and recommendations. This search opened up the Pandora’s box that no one in the skin care industry was caring to address. The couple could not find a single brand that had products meeting the necessary safety benchmarks. Almost all the search results were dangerous for young ones, especially new-borns and hence a no-no for parents.

This however should be noted that unlike the Indian scenario, the west, notably US already had brands that catered to toxin-free natural products. Products that have all the ingredients with proper certifications. Though, with import cess and other taxes, every such product becomes automatically expensive to buy in India. Delay in supplies is another problem. This would have ultimately made the right kind of care for a child, a luxury. Same was identified by this couple and then they founded Honasa Consumer which is the parent company that runs Mamaearth. It did not happen overnight; the co-founders wanted the right kind of solution that would stand indubitable and be able to fairly represent their goal of toxin-free products. Before their launch, they researched day and night to identify what the parents of the millennial age think. Often quoted in various media portals, Varun and Alagh have admitted to talking to many parents to understand what kind of demands they have when it comes to products in childcare. They came to the conclusion that there is indeed a wide gap that has created a potential vacuum when it comes to supply of such toxin-free baby products.

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For new ideas that are more authentically designed, keeping in mind customer’s well-being to shore, an awakened sense of beauty has to preside. As per the millennial age term, the ‘wokeness’ of the crowd can only make the space for such a brand or gives an opportunity to explore one.

Gurugram based Mamaearth’s target market has evolved due to demographic factors and its baby care segment push has given it a hold on the niche. Despite fierce competition from the likes of giants like Himalaya, Johnson and Johnson, Mee Mee products and SebaMed, Mamaearth’s clear differentiation when it comes to propositions and their stiff hold on the brand image has kept them a rising star of the segment.

As per a report from Agency Reporter in the period of 2014-2019, the baby care market generated revenue of approximately $31 billion. With the rising population and fertility rate of India, the baby care market becomes a direct benefactor of it. This paints a rosier than reality picture as far as Mamaearth is concerned. While the success seems guaranteed given the tide is in favour of baby care brands, the niche that Mamaearth focuses on is a tiny winner today. Why so? Out of the whole chunk of revenue gathered by the sector, only 2-3% was from cosmetics. The major portion is still controlled by toys and clothing. Now, when this is put against Mamaearth’s figures, new revelations are discovered. The brand has already raised $22 million in funding. It also became the first brand in 2019 to reach the 100-crore mark in India. The brand which had just 22 lakhs in revenue in 2017 has now marked a figure over 5 crores. That is a tremendous 25 times upgrade in revenue in a small span of 4 years. With such a small market size of baby care cosmetics under the baby care industry, how has Mamaearth shone the brightest in just a few years?

Explaining Mamaearth’s sensation, Draksha Raghuwanshi, beautician, who keenly follows skincare brands and development, talks to Dutch Uncles, “In order to understand the unprecedented growth of this start-up, one has to look at the factors that make a disruptor brand in cosmetics popular. The biggest factor here is clout. New in the market, new with the concept, a brand for millennials, Mamaearth had only one-way out- ingenuity. They were clever. They knew that the millennial space is the one that happens to be the most aware segment of their targeted audience. These people are actively searching on the internet just like Varun and Alagh were. They are ready to get influenced given the product is fair and square with its quality too. And that amalgamation of delivery along with publicity worked wonders for Mamaearth.” Today Mamaearth’s social media presence is immense. It is inarguably one of the most talked-about brands in the social media circle.

On Instagram itself, they have 5,96,000 followers. Their every post garners around 1500 likes and 100 plus comments on an average. Mamaearth’s approach has consistently been one of a conscious brand as is reflected in their advertising campaigns. Draksha sheds some light on this, “You see their posts even after five today are centering around appeal to users for the protection of the environment. From the washroom panels of famous show Biggboss to YouTube sensation Gaurav Taneja of the Flying Beast channel expressing their contention regarding the products, Mamaearth is creating all the right buzz and in proper channels. Can you beat the retail setup, fixed targeted audience of Johnson and Johnson or the Himalayas of the world, any other way? No. Mamaearth has been about the difference in offering, product placement, packaging and overall feel of the brand. So, you’ll see them advertising in different lanes.”

One of the biggest benefactors in this success of this brand as per Draksha has been the word-of-mouth publicity it has earned, “You go to a market today and ask for baby products, just the name of Mamaearth rings a bell to the seller as a recommendation. I have seen friends suggesting to each other the products of Mamaearth. With a gradual shift in marketing tactics, they have to a normal extent established themselves as a brand of skincare that has organic, toxin free ingredients from just being just a baby care brand.”

A start-up which has accounted its success from its moves on the online sales has a transferable influence. If the brand’s name has started making noise, it can expand in a gradual phased manner. This is how Mamaearth too patiently took the step to expand their catalogue towards skincare and derma care products. Today, they are no more just a baby care brand. Today, they are a skincare brand that sells everything from an Anti-Hair-Fall skin kit to Wedding Glow kit. There is a diversity of categories. There is variety. Things look more like a skincare brand now than anything else. With the already accumulated brand awareness, they are embracing this penetration in a totally different sector of skincare keeping their core brand value the same. Albeit being held back initially due to their positioning of being a product series that mothers depend upon. Such an image doesn’t align well with a more gender oriented or unisexual approach of other skincare brands. Mamaearth quickly rectified it and today per the same report from Forbes, nearly half the customers are males.

How did this happen for such a young brand? It was possible due to the lean innovation model, Mamaearth followed from its inception. Where, every step gets influenced by early customer feedback. This approach has given an edge to Mamaearth above other brands and has saved a lot of resources, something that start-ups are always in a crunch of.

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Mamaearth had only one-way out- ingenuity. They were clever. They knew that the millennial space is the one that happens to be the most aware segment of their targeted audience.

Draksha Raghuwanshi, Industry Expert

Success for Chief Mom and Chief Dad, namely, Ghazal and Varun at Mamaearth has been a well-devised plot. In an attempt to solve a personal problem, they went on to identify and diagnose, a visible gap in the cosmetic industry. Their solution today is selling like hotcakes to around 2 million people. Mamaearth’s trajectory when seen keeping in mind the subsequent investments they have been able to raise, looks overall positive. Not just that, it testifies trust from both the sides, the market and the consumer base. With immense competition from players that are established in the market, some with legacy, some with capital-Mamaearth’s future is a story to keep an eye on.

For more such interesting stories, follow our Inspire section.

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