Beauty brand d’you is changing how you shop

With just two products on their roster—a do-it-all serum and a ceramide moisturiser—d’you is looking to cut through the BS

Scroll through Instagram, flip through a magazine and walk through the aisles of a store and you’ll know this to be true: a new beauty product is launched every other day. In such a crowded market, how do you create a skincare brand to cut through the noise and make a statement? Perhaps create just one product that’ll change things up, instead of overwhelming consumers with too many options. Shamika Haldipurkar did exactly that with her brand d’you, launching it with Hustle—a serum that combines over 11 active ingredients to brighten, nourish, protect and repair the skin all at once. But how do you pack so many things together into one ingredient list, simultaneously educating your consumer that quality is indeed better than quantity?

The market for beauty products is currently a crowded space. Why did you decide to launch a skincare brand right now?

When I was working on launching d’you, I knew nothing about the beauty industry. I booked a one-way ticket to South Korea and went there to find a lab that could help realise this ambitious formulation I had in mind. My impetus to start a beauty brand was to infuse innovation in the Indian market, as I was seeing a lot of brands do the same thing over and over again. We had the clean beauty wave, followed by the single-ingredient product wave where every brand had a 10 per cent Niacinamide serum or Vitamin C serum.

When I wanted to purchase a sophisticated formulation, I had to always look overseas and order from either Cult Beauty or have friends and family travelling from the United States bring it back from Sephora. I therefore wanted to create a brand on par with the international ones, but right here in India. I wanted to create high-quality formulations in luxury packaging, so that we could build a brand that consumers in India deserve.

You launched with one stock keeping unit (SKU)—that's a huge gamble. Why did you create Hustle and how did you think it would work?

My strategy was to launch one hero product that would truly be a gamechanger for many, gain the trust of our customers through the efficacy, and then keep building more products mindfully. We put in so much research and development into making this formulation that I had to have the confidence to launch an entire brand on just one SKU. This confidence was also a testimony to the product’s merit. Additionally, launching a beauty brand just for business or trading was never my motivation, and so the traditional approach of launching multiple SKUs to acquire more customers wasn’t how I had envisioned the brand. I wanted to build it slowly and steadily, gaining the market's trust one step at a time, instead of disrupting it with a volume of products. It was quality over quantity, always.

How do you go about creating a sophisticated formula with so many potentially unstable ingredients?

When it came to formulating Hustle, the idea stemmed from a personal pain point of really not wanting, or being able to stick with, long skincare routines. As much of a beauty buff I was, using five to six single-ingredient products AM and PM was just not a sustainable practice. I hunted long and hard for a product that had combined these essential actives in one bottle—Vitamin C, Niacinamide, Peptides, Hyaluronic Acid, Polyglutamic Acid, Arbutin, Panthenol, Ferment extracts, Antioxidants, Squalane, Vitamin E, Adenosine and many more. When I couldn’t find such a product, I decided to develop one myself.

When we began the R&D and formulation process, the first challenge was how so many labs turned us down, or dropped mid-way because they refused to make this formulation as per our standards. The resistance of the labs to use so many active ingredients in one formula—and in an active dosage—was something we really had to work around. It’s common practice in skincare to use “concept ingredients,’” which means that while you add an ingredient, it’s in very low concentration, but you add it anyway so you can mention the ingredient while marketing the product. We were very much against that.

Ensuring stability of multiple different actives in one formula and keeping intact their pH points, while still ensuring effective delivery of each ingredient, was a long process. We used different delivery mechanisms like liposomal and encapsulated technology to achieve end-product efficacy and a stable pH point suitable for daily usage. Stability was the most difficult, and we did rigorous stability testing to achieve that.

How did you formulate the right marketing and communications plan to create a buzz with this do-it-all product?

Wrong marketing can kill the best of products, and great marketing can even sell the worst of products. But when you market well and you have a winning product is when you hit the jackpot. With all our launches, we try to convey the science behind the formulation to the audience. Plus, we try to actually fill a gap in the market and address a pain point. In the case of Hustle, it was easy because we were aiming to address the issue with too many layered products, and many consumers related to it.

Tell me about clean beauty fear-mongering. Why do you want to educate your consumers about this?

I would hate to sell something using fear as a tool of persuasion. When your marketing is more focused on talking about what is not there in your product, instead of telling me what is actually in it, it shows that you have little faith in what your product actually contains. I think the Indian consumer deserves better than that.

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