D2C Beauty And Personal Care

Abhinav Saraogi

CEO's Office, Pee Safe

"The D2C space has seen significant traction in the post-COVID era, with the emergence of multiple brands. There are roughly 3 areas into which brands are venturing at the moment:

Focus on organic/natural products: Modern customers are more aware of the ingredients present in their products.

Rising awareness of the need to eliminate toxic chemicals is leading to consumers switching to brands that have organic or natural ingredients.

Alternative Channels for Marketing: For any D2C brand, Meta and Google form a major chunk of performance marketing expenses. With the rise of major multiple brands, the Customer Acquisition Costs have seen a steady increase. Major D2C brands have started diversifying their marketing expenses and exploring alternative marketing channels such as Moj, Snapchat, Sharechat, and PhonePe amongst others.

Going forward, these channels are likely to witness significant traction and are likely to compliment a brand's current presence on Facebook and Google. Further, brands are making a conscious effort to connect with their customers. Whatsapp has fueled the connection between the two. Major D2C brands are leveraging Whatsapp to engage with their customers and communicate updates and personalize consumer offers. Going forward, the dependence on SMS is expected to reduce.

Improving Customer Experience and Operations: Customers are used to the Flipkart and Amazon way of Delivery, which is same-day or next day. Major D2C brands have collaborated with logistics companies to introduce the Same Day Delivery and/or next-day delivery in certain regions."

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Komal Anand

Social Media Manager, WOW Skin Science

"Influencer marketing has been an important part of our marketing initiative to expand brand awareness across various consumer segments. It worked for us because we worked with micro-influencers who have a strong following and credibility within their community as many consumers prefer to engage with regular people who offer credible advice.

In today’s digital-first behaviour among consumers, it makes the most sense to reach out, connect and engage within that medium first. In fact, when we launched as a bootstrapped brand, we decided to take the digital route, as it helped us in three ways.

First, the go-to-market was really fast – since we could do away with the middle tier. Second, with the digital platform, we could reach out to a larger section of consumers across the country, without having a physical presence there. We were able to cut through the retail clutter and be prominent to our consumers. As a digital-first organisation, we have ensured that our brand is available to our consumers across all the popular e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Nykaa, Purplle, Myntra etc.

Third, it gave us a better understanding of our consumer’s needs and keep up with the ever-changing market trends. Also, of course, the digital medium allows us to control operational costs and enables us to launch products faster. Even today, we continue to launch our products first in the online space before taking them to physical stores.

Our success in the online retail space has been due to one key strategy that we adopted – spending lots of time understanding consumer needs, building systems and processes to garner data and taking inputs from the insights generated by that data. We have spent lots of time perfecting the art of enhanced customer experience using the inputs we got from our online experience."

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Resha Jain

Vice President- Content, SUGAR Cosmetics

"Flowing investments means that D2C brands have a two-fold responsibility- they must utilize funds efficiently to scale at speed while strengthening core brand messaging. Brands will foray into tech solutions to cater to growth across product, marketing, content and AI/ML and VR will also be big emerging areas.

More money will allow D2C brands to view space on traditional media channels as well as digital platforms like OTT and social."

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Bhaskara Seth

Co Founder / CMO, Neemli Naturals

"Sustainability in the beauty industry needs to be tackled in two aspects, formulations and packaging. With formulations, a lot of research needs to be done to ensure no animal-based ingredients are being used, some elements can be carcinogenic in certain amounts and that needs to be studied, there are a plant-based versions of many ingredients like hyaluronic acid for example.

These are comparatively more expensive but should be used especially if that's something that your brand aligns with. These are some simple examples of the formulations, with the packaging it gets more complicated, for eg are plastics used widely, you can use glass but then too will you reuse that glass and how will the customer dispose of it. There are companies in India like Recircle for example who help with recycling and offsetting the plastic used by your company and ensuring that much gets recycled, they also help you with a recycling program albeit its still in its infancy stage but it helps customers to rightly dispose or recycle their employ bottles, I find this to be the most promising although one problem here is that with d2c customers have to courier their empty bottles which is further increasing the carbon footprint, ideally there should be recycling kiosks across different neighbourhoods in every city but that would take some time."

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