Trouble had been brewing at D2C brand Good Glamm group for a while with layoffs and delayed salaries, but things seem to have gotten markedly worse.
Representatives of VC firms Accel, Prosus Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners have stepped down from the board of Good Glamm Group. Accel partner Anand Daniel, Bessemer partner Vishal Gupta and Gaurav Kothari, a principal at Prosus Ventures, resigned as independent directors in December, according to Good Glamm Group’s filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. This is the latest setback for the firm, which has been facing a crash crunch for a while.
There had been hints of trouble at Good Glamm group after senior executives had begun leaving early last year. 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. In April, the company went ahead and laid off 150 employees, which at the time represented 15 percent of its workforce. In January this year, the group had failed to pay salaries to many of its employees, while simultaneously laying off another 150 workers.
The Good Glamm Group 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, and was later renamed as the Good Glamm group.
But the company had then embarked on an acquisition spree, and had focused on bringing media outlets under its umbrella. 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 onboarded.
But it appears that these rapid moves didn’t quite play out as the company had hoped. Last year, founders of Sirona Hygiene and The Moms Co, along with investors from the Indian Angel Network (IAN) had issued default notices to Good Glamm Group for failing to make final payments as per the original agreements of its acquisitions. The company was clearly facing headwinds, and was forced to delay salaries as it simultaneously let go of workers. And the situation must’ve turned especially dire — with three of its VC representatives on the board quitting, it appears that Good Glamm group’s investors have all but given up on the company, and could be looking to dissociate with it to avoid future litigation. This rapid unravelling of the Good Glamm Group is unfortunate, but perhaps unsurprising — both the media and the D2C sectors have been under pressure in recent years in India, and with the company having tried to combine the two under a single head, it appears to have faced the brunt of the slowdown in both.