$500,000 award money! Nykaa, Estee Lauder search for GenNext of beauty brands

There is good news for all budding entrepreneurs in the beauty space. If you have an idea or a product dealing with beauty, hair or skincare, now’s your opportunity to create a successful brand with the help of Estee Lauder and Nykaa.  

The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) in partnership with Nykaa, India’s leading omnichannel beauty and lifestyle retailer, have launched Beauty & You India that aims to discover, spotlight, and propel the next generation of Indian beauty brands. Created by ELC’s New Incubation Ventures the programme will support India-focused companies and entrepreneurs through a competitive application process. Awards to both pre-launch and in-market premium beauty concepts will be announced in November 2022 based on applications submitted via www.beautyandyouawards.com between August 1 and September 30, 2022. The total award money is $500,000.  

“It’s really a call for action from anyone – a creator, innovator, or anyone with an idea in their head on what they want to do in beauty. We are here to award them, but that is just a start. We are going to plug them into this eco-system that we are going to build together. We will accelerate their growth and help them come to market,” says Shana Randhava, Vice President, ELC New Incubation Ventures. 

Adds Anchit Nayar, CEO of Beauty for Nykaa: “There may be pools of capital out there but what we bring to the table is our strategic insight which very few financial investors can bring. We speak to brands and founders all the time and the biggest issue is not raising capital, it is solving problems and scaling. It’s the behind-the-scenes issues like managing supply chains, handling finance and accounts, building an ERP system, digital marketing, etc. Nykaa has done all this and improved. So there is a lot of value-add that we offer.” 

Randhava says that last year ELC looked at around a 1,000 brands globally and made only four investments -- one is a male-grooming brand in North America, the second is a sustainable brand called Heckles which is coming out of the UK, third they invested in their first brand in China, and finally the incubation project. “We are a 75 year-old company. We have 25 brands in our portfolio. We realised how hard it is for these companies to actually come to market. We realised that those which finally came to the market not only had a very strong idea-to-concept but were supported with a very strong network,” she says. Randhava says that both Estee Lauder and Nykaa realise that they are successful because of the eco-system that has supported them.  
 

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