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In recent years, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands have been talked about for their deep connect with new-age consumers in India and for becoming representative of the aspirations and needs of customers today. Equally, content-to-commerce has also been subject to a lot of discussions, including the most recent news of the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) too leveraging this strategy to grow its transactions.

Among these DTC beauty brands that have scaled over the last seven years, The Good Glamm Group has had a unique journey, starting with MyGlamm, one of the first to leverage growth through a proprietary content-to-commerce model.

A beauty company that has rapidly become one of the largest DTC colour cosmetics companies for South Asian skin tones, MyGlamm is also one of the younger brands. First launched by entrepreneur Darpan Sanghvi in October 2017, the company has since evolved from being a single brand, MyGlamm, to a group entity three years ago—Good Glamm Group. Today, it has a market-leading portfolio of beauty and personal care brands spanning segments such as colour cosmetics, mom and baby, organic personal care, intimate and menstrual hygiene, and sexual health.

The company credits this unprecedented growth to an effective leveraging of the content-creator-commerce model.

At the core of this model is incorporating deep customer listening, stringent QC measures, and ensuring rapid feedback into its product development process to meet the evolving needs of its customers.

The company has a large top-of-the-funnel audience and community with its owned content, social, and influencer assets. With 150 million monthly active users (MAUs) engaging with its social, content, and creator ecosystems, a significant 30% of content and conversations across its platforms are directly related to its products. This substantial interest translates into 30 million MAUs transitioning to the Group’s commerce product pages, representing a significant 20% of the top-of-funnel traffic.

From this traffic, it converts 1.5 million customers monthly, indicating a 5% conversion rate of conversion. The return on investment is equally impressive: with repeat orders increasing from 35% to 65%.

With this large top-of-funnel and conversion ratio, the group reports 16 million transacted customers on its dot com platform and an expansive loyalty programme comprising 25 million members.

This is especially interesting since today more DTC brands are talking about a paradigm of the increasing costs of acquiring customers on digital platforms. The ownership of the content platforms ensures that more than 50% of the company’s revenue is generated through its dot com platform, via which it acquires nearly 6 million new customers annually, one of the highest among consumer brands in India.

In fact, the company has reported an unprecedented growth trajectory as reflected in The Good Glamm Group’s reported revenue, which grew from Rs 49 crore to Rs 640 crore in two financial years, making it the fastest-growing consumer company in India. ⁠

Over the last fiscal, the group has started focussing on profitability and reducing discounts. As a result, it is now CM2 profitable, and it aims to achieve EBITDA profitability by the end of FY25.

“We observed a significant reduction in marketing costs from 75% of revenues three years ago to a mere 30% of revenue today,“ says Sanghvi.

The company credits this growth to its strategy of having extremely strong repeat customers. From 180,000 orders per month in January 2022, the Good Glamm Group now generates up to one million orders per month from its loyal customer base. At least 65% of its revenue comes from repeat customers, surpassing industry standards, almost at the same level as top marketplaces such as Nykaa and Amazon, among others.

If one compares Good Glamm Group’s numbers with Nykaa, India’s largest beauty marketplace, it shows a clear story of growth and scale. In the first nine months of FY24, Good Glamm Group’s DTC generated more than 270 million visits powered by the company’s content-to-commerce strategy, which is 33% of Nykaa’s beauty and personal care visits.

Additionally, Good Glamm Group has about 6 million annual transacting customers while Nykaa has 10 million. The former clocks 15 million annual orders while Nykaa does 40 million. It is important to note that Good Glamm Group comprises 5 brands while Nykaa—the largest beauty and personal care marketplace in the country—is home to tens of thousands of brands, both domestic and international. So, for Good Glamm Group to even come close to half of the Falguni Nayar-led brand’s annual transacting customer numbers is noteworthy.

Interestingly, the brands acquired by Good Glamm Group, predominantly marketplace-based initially, have also undergone transformation, with almost 50% of their revenue now stemming from the DTC channel. The acquired brands have witnessed a 5x growth in transactional volumes since the acquisition. Two years ago, Good Glamm’s acquired brands cumulatively did less than 10,000 DTC orders a month. At present, they clock more than 750,000 orders a month and the company attributes this to the use of its content-creator-commerce assets.

With content-to-commerce as a strategy at the core of its business, the Good Glamm Group is clearly now replicating the same model throughout the country and abroad.

It continues on its path also of customer centricity through a lot of allied activities which help in building brand goodwill, community service and resonance. Two such scaled initiatives are The Mompreneur programme, a platform launched in partnership with Startup India which serves as one of Asia’s largest platforms for mothers to gain financial independence and become entrepreneurs. The other mission the group supports is the mission to end period poverty through menstrual education and distribution of menstrual hygiene products to underserved communities through the group’s menstrual hygiene brand Sirona’s, Sirona Foundation.