Today, women are more powerful and ambitious in order to build their paths to fulfil their dreams and even inspire others to achieve and build their paths to success. With the rise of the e-commerce market and D2C business, the Indian beauty sector was always dominated by cosmetic brands for a long decade. One such example is Vineeta Singh, founder and CEO of a cosmetic brand named SUGAR founded in 2015. Vineeta came out to be an inspiring women entrepreneur for the last 2-To 3 years, who proved that risks that are taken with complete determination and well-designed thought, are worth taking.
“I always felt strongly about building something with women as the core customer, so when my first startup didn’t scale, I decided to launch a beauty subscription company with my co-founder, Kaushik, in 2012. The 200,000 women who shared their detailed beauty preferences with us were at the heart of our pivot to SUGAR Cosmetics, which launched as a direct-to-consumer makeup brand in 2015.”
Vineeta graduated in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras and further continued to pursue Business Studies from IIM Ahemdabad. By the end of her Business Studies course, She made up her mind to build and create her own startup. In order to build her own startup, she rejected an Rs1 crore job offer which she got when she was in her twenties. After she went through a failure in her two startups, she decided not to give up and finally she gave a shot to Sugar cosmetics, an e-commerce brand that resulted in a huge success that scaled up the brand to almost 35,000+ retail touchpoints in around 130 cities all over India. In the year 2020-21, the brand made revenue of Rs130 crore and raised a funding of $12 million making its valuation of Rs750 crore. Vineeta who operates the company along with her husband, Kaushik Mukherjee is hopeful for future growth that is Indian beauty market overall is expected to be worth around Rs10,000 crore. Vineeta along with her husband, Kaushik run the company and work for hand in hand proving to the world that they are a power couple. Her husband, Kaushik looks after the tech department whereas Vineeta leads the company being the CEO.
Vineeta and her husband, Kaushik who then worked for McKinsey before they started this brand together, while she was trying to build and update her abilities at another business. Soon, they came to the conclusion that they both enjoyed various things together such as Kaushik’s interest in technology and Vineeta’s passion for product development and marketing. And as a result of this, both came together to start this brand SUGAR cosmetics.
“We have a long way to go and great goals to achieve! Success to me is having the flexibility and capacity to achieve whatever I want without fear of failure. To be honest, I had my reservations when I turned down the job offer when I was 23 years old. But, in keeping with my concept of having no regrets, I pursued my ambitions. I was quite enthusiastic about being an entrepreneur and starting a business. I simply knew that if I didn’t do it now, I’d regret it for the rest of my life, so I went ahead and did it,” said Vineeta Singh.
According to Vineeta, women in India always struggle to get the perfect shade of cosmetics that matches their skin tone and because of this, they always depend on makeup products that are of international brands. This is where Vineeta launched the brand SUGAR cosmetics that aimed towards designing makeup products just for Indian skin tones that are made in India. Initially, when the duo Vineeta and Kaushik started raising funds for the company, they were told that the e-commerce beauty market would be a small market and would not be able to compete with other big FMCG companies without raising hundreds of millions of dollars funds. As of now, the company raises funds in millions and sells more than 650,000 products per month. Apart from their website and app, they even have offline retail stores in around 130+ cities all over India. Recently in the year 2021, the company stood for the rights of Warner Bros and launched their SUGAR X WONDER WOMAN collection which resulted in a huge success.
