“When you start building something, you don’t really think about scale or valuation but how much people are going to love what you are building,” shares Kaushik Mukherjee, Co-Founder & COO, SUGAR Cosmetics, which recently completed eight years in the beauty and skincare category.
As part of the e4m D2C Revolution series, we spoke to Mukherjee who shared the brand’s journey from its inception in 2015 and how the founders (Kaushik Mukherjee and Vineeta Singh) realised that the beauty space, especially the cosmetic category within the beauty space, was right for disruption.
“Historically, skincare has been a larger market and everybody focuses on skincare. But when you see the products on your digital screen, skincare at the end of the day dissolves in your skin. Whereas makeup engages consumers in a totally different way, lights up the pixels on your screen!” Mukherjee explained.
He also spoke about how in the initial days the founders were grappling with the question of whether they wanted to be a large online brand or a large beauty brand.
“We didn’t really know a lot about the online space nor did we appoint anybody senior who could lead a completely different vertical. We tried doing it ourselves. Even though it took time, today slightly more than half of the revenue for the company comes from offline retail,” Mukherjee shared.
SUGAR recently collaborated with OTT platform Amazon Prime Video, for the second season of its show, ‘Made In Heaven’. “We have also invested and dabbled in the wedding space earlier, with our property called Sugar Brides that ran for a couple of years. This collaboration is another extension of our interest in this space,” Mukherjee mentioned.
He also shared the brand’s expectations of being inexplicably associated with the wedding space in the next 5 to 6 years.
Watch the video for the full interview.
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