From Earth To Bottle The opportunity size for the beauty and skincare industry right now stands at around $4.4 billion
By Shrabona Ghosh •
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What started as a pet project later turned into a full fledged business for Harini Sivakumar, cosmetic chemist, founder and CEO at Earth Rhythm. "The major trigger to start a soap-making product was due to a specific skin condition of my older child, it's fair to say that it was just a pet project, back in the day. It was only after doing that for a year or two, the whole thought of doing this consistently sunk in and that's when I had to elevate my thinking to see how that can be converted into a regular/mainstream business," said Harini Sivakumar.
"The brand started getting some good, nice recognition from my friends and the family community. We slowly started expanding the product portfolio and then added more people to our core team."
The opportunity size for the beauty and skincare industry right now stands at around $4.4 billion. Establishing Earth Rythm as a D2C brand, had its own set of challenges. The brand has an in-house manufacturing. "One of the biggest decisions that I took when we started the brand was to decide whether we wanted to manufacture in-house or go through a third party manufacturing route. I had completed a course on cosmetic science & advanced formulations and hence we decided to keep the manufacturing in-house. This decision is still a good one but as you can imagine, this means one must plan demand forecasting, procuring raw materials, working on the formulations, R&D on new products, logistics and delivery, among others. We also end up doing additional certifications to maintain a global standard and hence we go through "ECOCERT', "FDA' and related approval mechanisms."
Between FY ending 21 and 22, the brand has grown by over 500 per cent and its spending in marketing has gone up by almost two times. The company is looking forward to a five times jump and targeting INR 185 crore ARR for FY 2022 -23. " Our major focus on expansion would be towards beauty and bath for this year. We are also planning to go offline in full steam and targeting to open 100 -plus kiosks PAN India."
Factsheet
- Best seller: Murumuru shampoo bar, Hybrid Sun Fluids, Lip and Cheek Tints
- Total SKUs: 162
- Team size: 100+
- Repeat customer ratio: 49%
- Online platform resulting in maximum revenue: 70%
- Turnover for FY 2021-22: 500% jump
- Split between offline and online sales: 100% onine
