New Delhi: Vellvette Lifestyle Pvt. Ltd., the parent company of homegrown beauty brand Sugar Cosmetics has acquired a majority stake in natural skin and hair care brand, ENN Beauty for an undisclosed amount.
The investment will give Sugar Cosmetics a play in the hair and skincare market. For ENN, the investment will help it gain scale and expand reach in offline stores.
ENN Beauty’s founder, Nandeeta Manchanda will work closely with Vineeta Singh and Kaushik Mukherjee, co-founders of Vellvette Lifestyle, to accelerate the brand’s online presence and make inroads in offline retail, the two said in a statement on Thursday.
In 2020, India’s beauty and personal care industry was estimated $16 billion; it is expected to grow at 12% per annum to reach $28 billion by 2025, according to estimates by RedSeer. More niche direct-to-beauty brands have emerged helping consumers address specific personal care needs.
“Over the past decade, the beauty industry has evolved and undergone a sequence of changes owing to the close attention brands are now paying to the evolving needs of the consumer,” said Vineeta Singh, CEO and co-founder, Sugar Cosmetics.
ENN Beauty has been on the company’s radar for a while, Singh said.
“With this new association, we plan to take her brand to a new high and make them an Indian household favourite. Our target for ENN Beauty will be to help deploy our playbook of scaling Sugar to grow ENN Beauty past the ₹100 crore annualized sales mark even faster,” Singh added.
Sugar will help ENN widen access to offline distribution as well as tap into its online sales and marketing infrastructure.
“The kind of consumers that Sugar had, they were also looking at products that could be safe, vegan, cruelty free and natural. Given that Sugar has access to more than 50 million women through its online platforms, and the 35,000 stores where we have a distribution access, we felt we can help this brand scale much faster,” Singh said.
In the next 12 months, ENN’s products will start retailing across high-end beauty stores. By the end of the year—20% of ENN’s sales could come from offline retail.
“With this association, ENN Beauty will be able to leverage a digital audience of over 50 million beauty enthusiasts while it ramps up its retail presence to over 100 outlets by the next financial year. The team will also look at re-strategizing on the brand product’s average selling point to make it more accessible and desirable to women from Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets as well,” the company said.
ENN Beauty sells skin and haircare products such as masks, oils and scrubs.
As it enters retail, the two companies will work on smaller pack sizes and lower price points to ensure access to mass market shoppers.
Launched in 2015, Sugar Cosmetics clocked over Rs130 crore in revenue in FY21. The company currently offers over 550 products in makeup and skincare verticals.
While Sugar is bullish on skincare as a category, it is not actively scouting for investment opportunities over the next 12-24 months. “Of course, if anything interesting comes out, we may always consider,” Singh said.
link