As a teenager in Mumbai, Kezia and her best friend sold their fathers’ used lager bottles and newspapers to buy cigarettes and a rickshaw ride to dance classes. With her first ever earnings from teaching dance, aged 18, they went for beers. “At that time we didn’t have money but we had so much fun,” she says. “Now there’s money, but no time!”
A 2020 labour survey showed that just 26.2 per cent of all workers in India were women. That may be a bit better than neighbouring Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it lags behind major Asian economies.
Those who do work face a stark gender pay gap. The same survey found Indian women earned an average of $184 per month, compared with men’s $234. India’s informal sector, where many women labour for low pay, has also been slower to recover from the pandemic.
Yet although working women such as Kezia, who is now 31 and in real estate, are still the minority, analysts say that with the economy growing and attitudes changing, they have more money (and freedom to spend it) than ever before. Kezia describes her household — from her 91-year-old grandmother, a former seamstress, to her mother and aunts, all of whom worked when she was a child — as having “big boss lady energy.”
Ventures such as Mumbai-based Boss Lady Cosmetics are squarely aimed at this demographic. Targeted to 20 to 35-year-olds, the products have names like “Ashes of Patriarchy”, for which customers shell out the equivalent of $12-$20 each time they shop. Founder Kajol Bafna defines a “boss lady” as anyone who goes “for her dreams . . . whether she should succeed or fail”. In India, she adds, “it is definitely difficult to go against what you’ve been taught, what the society would say”.
Boss Lady is just a small player in a vibrant and booming cosmetics sector. India’s beauty and personal care industry could grow from almost $10bn in 2019 to $15bn by 2024, Euromonitor projects.
Payal Balse, a freelance make-up artist in Mumbai, says she has seen “the biggest boom in the make-up industry in the past few years”. In the past, “India was an underserved market as far as beauty is concerned.” But, she says, the arrival of the online beauty outlet Nykaa, founded in 2012 by veteran investment banker Falguni Nayar, changed that. “Nykaa brought a . . . make-up revolution in India,” she says, one that came on the back of a shift to ecommerce and social media use.
In India, the release of suppressed demand has been like “a pressure cooker letting off steam”, says Rama Bijapurkar, a consumer expert.
When the online beauty start-up listed in November, investors were so eager that Nykaa’s stock price doubled the day after its IPO. Nayar, whose family owns 52 per cent of the company, became India’s wealthiest female self-made entrepreneur.
That was a revelation, says Saurabh Mukherjea, author and chief investment officer at Marcellus Investment Managers. Investors had known “that jewellery and apparel were big markets where women spend money, and you could invest in them and make money”, he says.
Traditionally, Indian investors have seen personal care as a steady if uninspiring market. But make-up has now become a sector “with zing and frisson and sex appeal”, Mukherjea adds. There is now a wider recognition that jewellery and clothing “are not all that women spend money on”.
As investors search for the next Nykaas, the value of beauty start-ups has rocketed. Online cosmetics marketplace Purplle, a competitor to Nykaa, was valued at $700mn this year. The parent company of make-up brand MyGlamm, which sells directly to consumers and is backed by blue-chip investors including Amazon, was valued at $1.2bn in November. Minimalist, a skincare start-up, just raised $15mn from Sequoia and Unilever.
There are also signs that other businesses are catching on to the “boss lady” marketing demographic, including two-wheeler driving schools for women. Kezia is learning to drive a scooter at one of them. That sounds empowering, I suggest. Actually, she replies, it’s not that straightforward. One woman from the group was asked by her family to stop working after she married — women’s progress in that regard is still “50:50”, Kezia says.
chloe.cornish@ft.com