A BEAUTIFUL PURPOSE

Five prominent women entrepreneurs speak about how they navigate challenges to build successful beauty brands.

- GEETIKA SACHDEV

MASABA GUPTA 
Founder, LoveChild 

Often known as the ‘queen of prints’, Masaba Gupta’s journey in fashion has been inspirational. When she decided to launch her beauty brand, LoveChild, in 2022, her loyalists couldn’t stop gushing over the news. However, not many know that Masaba’s entry into beauty happened way back in 2013 with a collaboration with Lakme‒. “At that point, collaborations weren’t even a thing, let alone anything in the space of beauty. I remember seeing what Kylie Jenner had done with lip kits and thinking how great an idea it was. India didn’t have anything of that sort,” she tells Bazaar India.

“When I reached out to Lakme‒, I proposed a collaboration where they were to decide a category that made business sense to them. My idea was to just lend our name, expertise, and design language to the product. That was the birth of Masaba Lips, a range of chubby lipsticks that had 10 shades,” adds Masaba. Later, she chased Nykaa for two years—to bring to life her vision of a private label that was a Masaba and Nykaa association. The collaboration that began in 2017 lasted until the coronavirus pandemic struck. At this juncture, she was certain of building a separate engine under the House of Masaba umbrella. That’s when LoveChild came to life.