Unburdened by legacy

THE STARTUP HAS POSITIONED ITSELF AS A CLEAN, CONSCIOUS, AND CRUELTY-FREE BEAUTY BRAND

- AYANTI BERA

JUST OVER A DECADE ago, one thing was clear to Shankar Prasad, then 39—he wanted to build a business. The thrill of creation had always drawn him in, whether as a management trainee on the factory floors of Hindustan Unilever (HUL) where he learned the basics of the consumer goods industry, or many years later, as a director in a private equity fund where he spent most of his time working with cosmetics brand Faces Canada.

"Even though I was from the fund that owned the company and not the company itself, I used to work like it was my company," Prasad says, adding that it was very difficult to build a cosmetics make-up brand in India back in the 2010s. "The market was nowhere close to the kind of excitement that you see now, and you had to build a distribution network brick by brick through mom and pop shops."

With Faces Canada, he had to pivot from being the home-brand of a large modern trade chain, to a fully distributed general-trade-heavy structure. Despite the challenges, Prasad's inclination towards building a beauty and personal care company persisted.

So when he quit his role in 2013 at what is now known as Everstone Capital, he almost immediately started working on the first line of products that he launched a year later under the brand "Plum Goodness." "I later came to know that there is a term for my idea; it's called a clean slate brand," Prasad says.