How Purplle Became an Early Mover in Beauty The online beauty marketplace start-up has recently closed a Series C round of funding led by Goldman Sachs

Blenders Pride Reserve Collection presented BIZ Experiences India's 35Under35 2020 list which included some leading names from the field of BIZ Experiencesship and Suyash Katyayani and Rahul Dash made it to the coveted list.

Taking global cues and leveraging upon the transformation of the way middle-class Indian women shop for their make-up, Suyash Katyayani along with Manish Taneja and Rahul Dash took the BIZ Experiencesial plunge into the e-commerce sector, to give birth to Purplle.

Purplle provides a personalized digital shopping experience for consumers through the creation of detailed digital user personas and enabling users to test make-up virtually and recommending products based on their user persona, search keywords and purchase behaviour. "We are one of the pioneers in creating digitally native beauty brands in India as we offer a wide and unique assortment ofdirect-to-consumer brands which are very accessible," Katyayani says.

The online beauty marketplace start-up has recently closed a Series C round of funding led by Goldman Sachs who invested $30m and Verinvest who invested $8m. In the past, Purplle has raised capital from Ivycap ventures, JSW ventures, Blume Ventures and many notable top tier angel investors.

2019 has been a phenomenal year for Purplle. "Early on in the year we broke even at the EBITDA level and we haven't looked back since. We continue to achieve more than 100 per cent year-on-year growth. Our app was featured in Google I/O 2019 at the global scale. We have also expanded our fulfillment centers in 2019 and now we have over 2,00,000 sq. ft of warehousing space spread across three geographies. Our direct-to-consumer brands have seen a multifold jump in 2019. We enabled 14 million virtual makeup try-ons last year through our app and website. The total digital beauty personas created for the consumers crossed the 3 million mark," Katyayani proudly mentions.

Pillars of Growth

• Creating a unique supply of products/brands on the platform with partnerships from global brand houses and own direct-to-consumer brands.
• Curation of personalized digital experiences through user personas, AR and company's recommendation engine.
• Creating a state-of-the-art, global supply chain of world class beauty products.

(This article was first published in the February 2020 issue of BIZ Experiences Magazine. To subscribe, click here)