Co-founder and CEO Rooshy Roy recreated her beauty brand Aavrani last year to be unapologetically Indian. She reached out to consumers, upgraded the packaging to pay homage to India, and connected with her culture in a new way. Her customers, almost half of which are South Asian women, have responded enthusiastically. Month-over-month sales have increased 9X since the rebrand in August 2020 and year-over-year sales are on track to exceed 2020 by 6X thanks in part to a $2 million seed round and a partnership with Amazon.
“It’s been a wild ride, we’ve been growing beyond expectations,” Roy says. “At this point, we’re in a place where we’re looking to try new and creative ways to get our brand soul out there given just how saturated and competitive the space of beauty is these days, especially in skincare.” Part of that is through storytelling. The brand is in the process of launching a series of holistic beauty ritual videos intended to allow customers to connect with beauty in a deeper, more meaningful way. The first video titled Mask & Meditate encourages viewers to grab their favorite mask and spend the minutes it takes for it to dry being still.
The concept was inspired by Roy’s own hectic experience building her business and trying to multitask while doing her skincare. “In India, doing a turmeric mask, we would never be anxious and trying to pile on things,” she says. “It was always such a calm and peaceful experience and it occurred to me that there’s an opportunity for us to bring a little bit of that with our product. It’s a way of bridging the gap between beauty and wellness.”
Aavrani founder Rooshy Roy
Roy hopes to find more ways to connect and reach Aavrani customers moving forward. She shares that half of the money raised in the seed round will be distributed across and dedicated to boosting the brand’s marketing. “Both Justin [Silver] my co-founder and I have extensive finance backgrounds and so really we’re lacking in that seasoned marketing perspective and just general know-how and knowledge,” she says. “I realized that the landscape of digital marketing and the whole spectrum of what you can do and what’s possible is just so much wider and broader than I had imagined.”
The pair brought on a senior vice president of marketing in the early part of the year. They also brought on a director of digital and e-commerce to help elevate Aavrani’s online presence and shopping experience and a digital designer to work on graphics. The company currently has seven full-time and five part-time employees and is focused on hiring for its marketing team. “We’re still looking to build out our in-house talent as we grow and, at the same time, want to participate in marketing opportunities that we haven’t yet been able to afford, like partnerships with other brands, influencer strategy, whatever it might be,” Roy says. “We want to make sure we can equip the team with the right funding to test and try out these new marketing ideas.”
The other half of the seed round will go toward research and development. The brand currently has four products on the market, but 16 in the pipeline. The first two, a rose clay mask and an oil cleanser, will launch in October and were inspired by customer feedback. “Since the rebrand, we’ve been engaging so much more deeply with our customer understanding who she is, where she shops, how she feels at the end of the day, at the beginning of the day, when she’s interacting with skincare and have come to just learn so much about the experience and how we can make it even better and more robust,” Roy says. Haircare—specifically scalp care—products are also in the works.
Aavrani has 16 new products in the pipeline. The first two, a rose clay mask and an oil cleanser, will launch in October and were inspired by customer feedback.
On expanding beyond the four skincare steps the brand has become known for, Roy says: “I don’t want to just create a product for the sake of doing that and duplicate something if there’s already a great one out there, but, at the same time, where there are these small opportunities for us to insert ourselves as an Indian-inspired alternative that’s the best of something that hasn’t yet existed, I think that’s a great way to elevate the brand and command presence as a holistic beauty company.”
Despite Roy’s initial hesitancy, the launch with Amazon is expected to boost sales by 30%. “We realized that there’s no escaping Amazon from an e-commerce perspective,” she says on that early uncertainty. “We’re never going to be able to conquer what they can do from the backend of the internet. So, if you can’t beat them, join them.” The e-tailer currently stocks Aavrani’s best-selling Glow Activating Exfoliator as well as its Balance Restoring Serum and its Ritual Discovery Set. Roy’s working on getting the rest of the products on the site. “We’re remaining in a really solid place there, we have over 4.5 stars average in reviews and we’re able to preserve the integrity of the brand despite Amazon being more of that convenience play,” she says. We haven’t seen that brand dilution in a way that I was kind of fearing, so it’s worked out really wonderfully so far.”
The hope is to partner with more e-tailers down the line before entering into brick-and-mortar. “I want to spend the next year really building that out before we start diversifying distribution,” Roy says. “Some of the learnings that we have had from speaking with other beauty brand founders is that it’s better to build the brand before entering physical retail. I want to best position us for success from that strategic perspective and really focus more on our direct-to-consumer site for the foreseeable future.”
Roy and Silver have raised nearly $4 million to date. And while Roy’s divulged that the fundraising process was “brutal” the first time around, it’s since gotten easier. The rebrand played a big part. “The first investor actually came to us in September of last year after they had seen the rebrand and then got a sense of some of the new stuff we were doing,” she shares. “So Justin and I actually didn’t have to outwardly seek people out this time around, we were able to basically have that first investor come in, introduce us to other potential investors, activate our prior investors that we had already had with a new opportunity to re-up and basically closed it within a few months.” She adds, “It was much smoother and faster, actually more so than either Justin or I could have dreamed.”
Source link : https://www.beautyindependent.com/indian-inspired-beauty-brand-aavrani-raises-2m-seed-round-and-launches-on-amazon
