The Good Glamm Group aims to go for an IPO around October next year. The company recently closed its Series E fund-raise round. Darpan Sanghvi, Group Founder & CEO of Good Glamm Group told businessline, that company is targeting to achieve a revenue of ₹1,500 crore before going for an IPO. The company, which has made many acquisitions in the past 3-4 years, has a portfolio of brands that include MyGlamm, the Moms Co, Sirona, Organic Harvest and St.Botanica. Theseo brands are supported by the company’s content, creators and community divisions.
QWhat is your plan for revenue growth and profitability metrics in the run-up to the IPO ?Our journey thus far has been of incredible growth. In FY 21, we were at ₹49 crore, and we ended FY 23 with ₹640 crore. By the time we go for the IPO, which will be by October 2025, we will be at ₹1,500 crore. Since 6-8 months ago, we have been focusing on profitability. We began by cutting discounts and marketing costs. Today, we get 1.5 million orders a month, of which 65 per cent are from repeat customers. This has helped us reduce our marketing costs to about 30 per cent of revenue. This helped us to become CM2 (contribution margin) positive in FY24. In the next two quarters we expect to become EBITDA profitable.
We are very clear on our DTC strategy. Unlike other brands which rely heavily on marketplaces, 60 per cent of the revenue for us comes from our own platform so we fully “own” our customers. Our content-to-commerce strategy has enabled us to have over 18 million “transacted customers” on our own dot com. TWe acquire between 400k – 500k new customers a month on own platforms. So overall, we don’t expect to see a growth challenge.
QYou recently formed a joint venture with tennis star Serena Williams marking the company’s foray into the US. How do you see the international business strategy panning out ?By the time we go for an IPO, we expect 30-35 per cent of our revenues to come from the international business. We worked on this collaboration with Serena Williams for the past 3-4 years. Wyn Beauty has been one of the largest beauty launches in the US and has been launched across 885 Ulta stores. This move helps us establish a global distribution platform. Our aim is now to take our Indian brands to the US. We will initially take the MyGlamm portfolio to the US. We sell our brands, such as Moms Co and Organic Harvest, in the Middle East across 200 stores.
QThere has also been restructuring, which has led to lay-offs. What’s your current workforce count?We are currently at a workforce of about 850 people. We optimised 150 people over the past 9-12 months. This is part of our strategy to remain focused on profitability. The workforce optimisation had to happen as the team was built through many acquisitions. So there were duplications and redundancies, and it took us about a year to do this; it was not done overnight. Given the crazy pace of growth in the past three years, we need to consolidate. We have finished the restructuring process and are focusing on maximising the bottomline.
QWhat is your comment on the default allegations made by an investor under arbitration?We have always maintained that we fully comply with the contractual obligations. Our intent as a company is always to resolve everything. I think the way it all got played out was very unfortunate. Hopefully, we will not have to wait for arbitration to resolve it.
QHow do you see the macroeconomic environment panning out regarding consumer discretionary spending?The DTC BPC space has been on a journey, and we have seen the emergence of 4-5 brands. So DTC brands, like us, that were able to break out and scale up over the past few years, I think, are now poised to be long-lasting . We see huge growth potential for the years to come. I believe now it will be much more challenging for the younger and newer DTC brands to achieve scale due to challenges such as access to capital. Factors such as low per capita spending on beauty and high digital penetration in India make beauty and personal care a very exciting category. The stress on budgets has been more at the mass level. We are positioned in the premium segment and are seeing good consumer demand.
