‘It is early innings for prestige beauty in India’: Akhil Shrivastava, EVP & CFO, The Estée Lauder Companies
Akhil Shrivastava, executive vice-president and chief financial officer of The Estée Lauder Companies talks about how it intends to bring more consumers into prestige beauty
For Akhil Shrivastava, executive vice-president and chief financial officer of The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC), India is more than a fast-growing beauty market. It is a long-term strategic opportunity, shaped by a young consumer base, rising aspirations and a deep cultural relationship with beauty. In this interview to Viveat Susan Pinto, Shrivastava discusses how it intends to bring more consumers into prestige beauty, and why disciplined investment will be key to unlocking the market’s potential.
Excerpts: What are you doing to bring more Indian consumers into prestige beauty? First, you have to build awareness. Consumers need to know your brands, understand what they stand for and discover what makes them distinctive. Second, that awareness has to be locally and culturally relevant. Beauty runs in the heartbeat of India. The key is to tap into this cultural context. Take our recent MAC bridal campaign (Forever in MAC), for example, which reimagines the traditional wedding family portrait.
It was shot in Mumbai by MAC's global creative director Nicola Formichetti, with the campaign celebrating individuality and self-expression. The third element is accessibility through our portfolio and price points. These are important ways of helping consumers experience our products for the first time. Will you expand your portfolio beyond the 14 brands currently in India? Are there particular categories you would like to enter?
We use consumer insights to understand which products, franchises and experiences are relevant to the Indian market, and we have continued to expand the portfolio over the years. The Ordinary, for example, came to India only a few years ago. There are more brands to come. But I would emphasise that our opportunity is not just about adding brands. We are still scratching the surface of what our existing portfolio can achieve.
It is early innings for prestige beauty in India. Every additional household that enters the category represents an opportunity to introduce consumers to a new experience. How will you improve penetration? Will the next phase involve more shop-in-shops, freestanding stores, retail partnerships or a stronger online presence? In India, the consumer is increasingly digital, but physical retail remains extremely important in prestige beauty.
We need to be present across both. We have strong partnerships with Nykaa, Tira, Shoppers Stop and Sephora, spanning online and offline formats. We have also expanded our presence on Amazon, with The Ordinary and Clinique. And we are entering quick commerce with select brands, having already established a presence on Zepto and moving forward with further opportunities in the channel, with Blinkit, for example.
The important point is that we want to expand access without compromising the desirability of our brands. We work closely with our retail partners because their success and ours are interconnected. When these retailers were building their businesses, we brought our expertise and brands to the table. As they have evolved, we have evolved with them. ELC has also spoken about its partnership with Accenture.
What will this mean for the business, particularly in India? Our enterprise business services partnership with Accenture is part of our broader One ELC strategy, which Stéphane (de La Faverie; president and CEO, ELC) and I have discussed along with our leadership team on several occasions. We are a company with more than 20 brands operating across many countries. The opportunity is to use our scale to standardise processes and operations, leverage technology and AI, and bring in best-in-class benchmarks.
The objective is to free our people up to focus on what matters most to our business: creativity, innovation and brand-building. Alongside Accenture, we are working with Shopify, through which we have transformed the front end of our e-commerce operations. We are also working with WPP on media. We want the scale and efficiencies of a global company, while retaining the agility and entrepreneurial spirit that allow us to respond to consumers quickly.
After more than 20 years in India, what continues to excite you about the market? India is, by far, one of the most exciting markets on the planet for us. There are larger beauty markets, but the cultural richness, the consumer opportunity and the potential for growth make this market incredibly special. We are thinking in decades, not quarters. And that is what makes the opportunity so exciting.
