Mumbai based, beauty product discovery platform VanityCask has raised seed funds from Singapore-based angel and venture capital firm RB Investments. The amount raised is undisclosed.
The company will use the funds to cover its fixed costs and logistics and advertising spend, reported VCCircle.
Founded by Tarun Joshi in November 2016, VanityCask offers specialized, theme-specific boxes in Skin, Hair and Spa editions. It is a subscription based model platform, which creates an alternate and effective discovery, marketing & distribution channel for the Indian beauty industry.
It provides only well known, premium & luxury brands’ samples and has partnered with Clinique, Vichy, Thalgo, Votre, Moroccan Oil, Balmain, OGX and Kama, Which further helps to stay in touch with the latest global developments in the world of beauty.
The core target for the company is aspirational Indian women (18-45), who are beauty conscious and constantly seek opportunities to upgrade their beauty quotient.
It claims to have a very encouraging response from the market, which is growing constantly at a healthy rate and managed to validate their Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It crossed 1000 customers mark in January 2017.
Speaking about challenges, Tarun Joshi said solving supply-chain problems was hard as there are a limited number of brands in India and logistics in the country is still unorganised. The low penetration of retail and the lack of sampling were seen as a key deterrent to growth of VanityCask, especially in the premium to the luxury segment.
The start-up has been growing Pan-India and competes with the brands like FabBag, My Envy Box, MSM Box and GlamEgo while Birchbox and Glossybox are among international players in the same space.
RB Investments, a Singapore-based boutique Venture Capital fund that invests across sectors globally and have an in-depth understanding of the Indian start-up ecosystem having invested in multiple companies like Faasos, Zooty, Swiggy, Voonic, BlueStone and 5aSec to name a few.
