SparklyCupcake
SparklyCupcake

Update – Finally launched the D2C men's personal care brand. It's been one hell of a journey!

Update to this — https://share.gvine.app/uhA3u5ZEizgE6vMD7

TLDR — Dropped job offers and started a D2C personal-care brand for men right out of college. Spent 6 months on R&D, onboarded a dermatologist, scaled Instagram to 14K. A lot of unplanned stuff happened – Incredibly tough, yet worth it! :)

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Almost a few months ago, I shared a post about not taking up job offers right out of college and starting a D2C personal-care brand for men. While I was initially hesitant, my post sort of blew up here, and I received both encouraging and not-so-encouraging comments from many of you.

Honestly, the ride has been nothing short of thrilling. Although I was aware of the challenges, nothing prepares you as much as doing it yourself.

Convincing manufacturers on MOQ was the hardest part. We flew to Chandigarh, stayed in the cheapest hotels, and met over ten manufacturers before we finally found one who met our criteria. With no experience in personal care, we reached out to dermatologists, some a decade or more our senior, hoping they would help us with product development. After weeks of trials and many errors, we finally cracked the code.

We also focused a lot on creating organic content because relying on FB Ads would have made it an unprofitable business. This approach worked; we scaled our Instagram to 14,000 followers and over 5 million views in just 1.5 months. Our followers were getting behind our brand messaging & positioning, it was an exciting time tbh.

But one morning, a month before our planned launch, we found that our Instagram was permanently disabled due to being linked with "suspicious accounts." Despite this, we continued working on content, product, packaging. And I’m excited to share that we are launching four products designed to tackle common skin problems that men experience.

I didn’t want to drag this on because I know long posts can be boring, but it felt necessary to give you all a proper update since many of you have asked. To make up for the lengthy read, dropping a discount code (in comments) exclusively for Grapevine members. :)

Thanks a lot for reading and I’d love to answer any questions you all might have!

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1mo ago15K views
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