India’s startup winter had begun more than 2 years ago, but it shows no signs of ebbing away.
The Good Glamm Group has laid off 150 employees, ET reports. These employees represent around 15 percent of its workforce. The company said it has put in place a new organisational framework to streamline operations, which led to eliminating certain redundancies over the last 15 months.
“This strategic initiative marks the culmination of the company’s final phase of team integration with a steadfast aim to be a profitable company in FY25,” The Good Glamm Group said in a statement. “The optimisation (layoffs) was a result of the integrations getting completed between the different acquired companies,” it added.
These changes come at a time when some of the company’s top leaders have quit the firm. In March, chief financial officer Piyush Kalra left the company to join appliances firm Versuni as its finance chief. In February, PopXO founder Priyanka Gill, who’d been accorded the cofounder label when her company was acquired by the Good Glamm Group, had joined investment firm Kalaari Capital as a venture partner.
MyGlamm had been founded by Darpan Sanghvi in 2015. Sanghvi had a BE in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from UT Austin, and had previously worked in the beauty space — he’d founded Sanghvi Brands in 2010 which had a portfolio of luxury wellness brands including Spa L’Occitane, ELLE Spa & Salon and Warren Tricomi Salons. In 2017, he founded MyGlamm, which was a direct to consumer (D2C) brand for beauty and international spa and salon products. In 2021, the company had become a unicorn after raising funds at a valuation of $1.2 billion.
While there’s no shortage of D2C brands, especially in the beauty space, MyGlamm had looked to innovate by building strong marketing channels for its products. Most D2C brands spend a large amount of money marketing their products to end consumers, but MyGlamm had aggressively acquired several content companies, which it can use to push its products. MyGlamm had acquired premium mom-and-baby brand MomsCo. It had also acquired baby products brand Baby Chakra and women-focused content platform POPxo, whose founders were listed as the cofounders of the Good Glamm Group. The company had also acquired youth-focused content platform ScoopWhoop. MyGlamm also owns influencer management platform Plixxo, which has close to 220,000 influencers onboard.
With several prominent media brands under its umbrella, the Good Glamm group had become a quasi media orgaization. But the last few years have been brutal for the media space — global new-age media company Vice filed for bankruptcy this year, and Buzzfeed appears to be on the verge of being bankrupt, with its stock trading 96 percent below its IPO price. Traffic to major media outlets has also plummeted in recent years, with users taking to platforms like X and Instagram for their content needs.
The Good Glamm Group, though, now becomes the latest Indian unicorn to lay off employees. Over the last two years, dozens of Indian unicorns have laid off employees in a bid to cut costs. The Good Glamm Group, too, seems to have expenses in mind. “In the last 12 months, we’ve been focusing on reducing our cost base,” Good Glamm Group CEO Darpan Sanghvi had said earlier this month. “Whether it’s fixed costs or marketing cost, and getting more operating synergies of all the acquisitions coming in together and getting to profitability, which is why with confidence I can say that FY25 will be profitable for us,” he had added. It remains to be seen if the company ends up in the black, but it firmly seems to be in the first phase of its plan of cutting costs.