Building a brand from scratch particularly when it is in a new segment or a category and then keep working on it when nothing goes right and no one believes in you is always the fundamental challenge for entrepreneurs. Mamaearth which is the first unicorn of 2022 with an operating profit of Rs 461 crore has had the most humble beginnings when no retail store wanted to keep its products. However, having belief in your product and solving a major market challenge goes a long way.

Working as a corporate trainer and then as a painter, Ghazal Alagh’s life changed once she became a mother. It was then that she started looking for chemical-safe products for her child which she could not find anywhere in India.

“We were importing the products and after talking to a lot of family and friends around I realized this is not just my problem. A lot of other parents were doing exactly the same. And, importing products is not actually convenient as not just it requires a lot of money but it also requires tracking friends and families. By the time, the product used to reach me, it used to have a shelf life of 2-3 months remaining. More than half the products used to get expired before I could get a chance to use them,” Ghazal Alagh said.

On top of that what would upset her is that nobody in India did anything about it and not even the legacy brands. So instead of choosing to crib about it and live with what you have for the rest of her life, she decided to do something about it. And, that is when things started to turn around for the brand.

“We talked to a few people and identified the kind of formulations we were looking at, we figured that a lot of ingredients that we wanted to be in the baby products or some of the ingredients that were there in the products that we were importing were readily available in India and available at a cheaper price. That gave us the confidence to move ahead with the idea,” Alagh further stated.  

Thus, Mamaearth started as an initiative to solve a problem. Varun Alagh, Ghazal’s husband and co-founder, and Ghazal starting with just 6 baby products believed that if they were able to help 100 people at the time, it would be something big enough.

Going All Digital

Choosing a D2C (Direct to consumer) line of business was more of a necessity than a conscious choice for the brand. Even for the first 6-8 months of launching the brand, it was only available on the marketplaces. The reason being nobody wanted to keep the brand in the physical stores.

“Did we think that by staying digital-only we could bridge as large as Mamaearth, probably not? We always thought that to scale things up we have to get to the retail side of things. When we entered into the D2C space when we launched our own website, and even through marketplaces, what we realized was that by sitting in one place, you are actually able to cater to consumers all across India, you cannot do that through physical stores,” she asserted.  

Mamaearth quickly realized that this was the future. This is something that is so convenient. If you go to retail, you will not be able to achieve that even today. The brand realized how much it could communicate through its own channel that it will not be able to do through marketplaces. That gave it the confidence to further invest in that channel and make it stronger that’s what it has been doing ever since.

“In the first two years, I think generally for anybody starting out the convenience of acquiring consumers pan-India and being able to communicate is the strength only D2C platforms give to you,” Alagh added.

Right Time to Scale and Expand

Mamaearth has kept consumer feedback as the basis for finding what strategies to devise going forward.

“We listened to our consumers and that we were particular about even today. At that point in time, I personally talked to about 700 moms just to understand what were their problems, and what is it that they want from the products that were already available in the market with that insight is how we launched the first six products,” she shared.

“We just continued doing that and they were the ones who six months later told me that you were doing really good for babies then why do you want to limit to the babies. Even we deserve toxin-free products. While we started with the face products then eventually we got into hair, body, and even recently launched color care --- adding a lot of care to the color you put on yourself. Be it lipsticks, foundation, - a color care segment is the latest that we have come up and all this has happened only by listening to consumers and solving some of the problems that we are facing,” Alagh further stated.

Setting Better Standards

As the brand grew, though it did not have any issue raising funds, however, the brand was still struggling to win the consumer’s trust. The brand then decided that it is going to go with external certifications and educating its consumers about toxins. In the end, when the brand was starting, the awareness of toxins was still low and so the brand worked with many vloggers and influencers to put the message out.  

Further, they got madesafe.org (a nonprofit based out of the US) on board. They check each and every ingredient in the product not just for whether they are safe or not just for human or baby skin but also for the environment. Also, they started using tech now to understand consumer sentiment around ingredients, the categories they are looking for, and our potential of further scaling things. They also ensured that they are looking at the business side of things.

Acquiring Consumers

If we look at the options available, customer acquisition is in fact very cheap these days. And, so bleeding money to acquire customers is not a viable option anymore. Instead, relying on better content (content-to-commerce) is now being seen as a better option.

“Content pulls in a lot of people’s attention. If you are able to present them with certain content which they understand and relate to, they will buy into it,” she explained.

The second important business strategy that Alagh suggested is that of ‘community building’. Community marketing is a brand growth strategy centered around bringing customers together over a topic that is aligned with, or directly related to, a brand in an engaging and non-intrusive way that puts customers first.

“If you launch a product without consumer insights, you will end up bleeding money.  No matter how you acquire consumers, it won’t work in your favor. So building a community who strongly believes in your purpose and vision and helps you take it forward through word-of-mouth, etc. could be another acquisition channel,” Alagh further added.

Alagh’s final advice to budding consumers is to focus on building a business that is growing MoM, YoY, sustainable, and profitable. Everything else will be taken care of.