French beauty giant L’Oréal, which has global revenues of $44.5 billion, is celebrating its 30th year in India. Aseem Kaushik who took over as country managing director, L’Oréal India, in January 2023, has been with the company for exactly that length of time. “I have been part of the 30 years story of L’Oréal in India,” he says with a disarming smile, describing how he was one of the first set of people to join the company when it was setting up operations here.
We are meeting at Machan, the jungle-themed coffee shop at the Taj Mahal hotel in Delhi for a quick lunch – Kaushik, who is based in Mumbai, where L’Oréal India has its HQ, is here for a FICCI meeting on skill development, and has a flight to catch post lunch. L’Oréal is big on skilling and a lot of its growth in India has come from its investments on skilling hairdressers and salons, you learn.
Kaushik says he is the proverbial small-town boy, having grown up in Chandigarh. He came to Delhi to do his business studies and joined L’Oréal in 1994 straight after that.
He describes how when L’Oréal – which is synonymous with hair care - first entered India, it opted to do so with its brand Garnier, launching the Ultra Doux shampoos. Incidentally, L’Oréal has a global flotilla of some 39 brands of which 26 are present in India. The brands are organised in four divisions – professional products, consumer products, Luxe and dermatological.
Bihar to Bombay
“Very soon after I joined, L’Oréal sent me on an amazing posting,” says Kaushik with a deadpan expression. “Where, Paris?” you ask eagerly. “Bihar,” he responds, with a mischievous twinkle, describing how he lived in Patna and launched Garnier products in several cities in the state.
“Very soon I was informed I would go and launch operations in Nepal,” he continues Recalling those days, he says there was limited flight connectivity and he would often bus it from Patna to Kathmandu – a journey that took 30 hours.
Since we don’t have much time, we quickly order our starters (it’s called pre-hunt at the Machan) and mains. Kaushik orders a chicken dish for himself and a Tuscany pizza for me. They are good without being memorable. For mains, without seeing the menu, I ask for Sariska Footprints – a pearl millet khichdi that I had really relished during the 46-year-old iconic restaurant’s big renovation and relaunch a few years ago.
To my disappointment it’s not available. So, I go with Titicaca greens (a quinoa, asparagus, beet salad). Kaushik who says he misses some of Delhi’s great food, orders a Kaziranga kathi kebab (egg rolls with chicken tikka) and earns an unamused look from the staff when he says he hopes it would be of “Nizam’s standard”. What arrives on the table is a huge rustic looking plate that he baulks at. This five-star believes in hearty portions. My salad is refreshing and filling.
Taking up his story, Kaushik describes how in those early days, L’Oréal figured that skincare was the big market in India. So, after shampoos, it launched Garnier skincare. “The very first anti-wrinkle cream in India was launched by Garnier,” he says, as were the very first hair conditioners.
It was in 1996, that the company launched hair colour. Interestingly, in the Indian market, says Kaushik, at that time, men were the bigger consumers of commercial hair colour products. “It was not that Indian women were not hiding their greys – but these were more henna and other solutions,” he says. Over 28 years ago, women would frequent beauty parlours largely for skincare - hair was mostly only a trim, he points out.
“We launched a crème-based hair colour. This marked the launch of the brand L’Oréal in India,” he says. “Hair colour is a category where we continue to have number one market share in India. We literally grew the hair industry from scratch here,” asserts Kaushik. And this is where the skill development came in.
“L’Oréal began training hairdressers how to colour, how to straighten hair, and how to treat hair. We have trained close to 350,000 hairdressers,” says Kaushik, who was in 2002 put in the professional products division with the job of creating salons. “We helped in the creation of almost close to 8,000 salons,” he says, pointing to successful chains like Looks and Geetanjali that benefitted from the programme. “Looks was a barber shop in Karol Bagh and Geetanjali was in Green Park. Now these are big unisex salons in high streets and malls,” he says. “For the first collaboration with Looks, we brought in the architects and designed the salon,” he says. “Then I launched Matrix, our accessible hair colour brand. Today Matrix is in over 15,000 salons,” he says.
He says L’Oréal has a win-win CSR programme called Beauty for a Better Life where since 2014 it has trained 12,000 disadvantaged women and placed 70 per cent of them in salons. The goal is to accelerate this and skill 100,000 such women by 2030
Overcoming barriers
After the stint with salons, Kaushik came back to the consumer products business working on brands like Garnier, Maybelline, and L’Oréal Paris. So, which is larger – institutional sales or retail? “Retail definitely. We reach 1.8 million retailers versus 50,000 salons,” he says.
He says when L’Oréal launched in India, there were two big barriers it faced. One was distribution. The second mountain to climb was how to find the right consumer with the necessary disposable income. “It has taken us 30 years to achieve this depth of distribution,” he says. The second problem was solved by the arrival of digital, especially the post-Covid acceleration in adoption. “Earlier it was a one-way communication with the consumer through TV or print. Now digital has solved that. Through precision media we can target the right kind of consumer and have a two-way conversation,” he says.
Significantly enough, in 2019, Kaushik was posted in Hong Kong, where he headed professional products for Asia Pacific, and where he saw the impact of Covid up close. From there he moved to Singapore. “At Hong Kong, we were the first ones to make a playbook for crisis management which was handy for the group to put into action,” he says. Were sales hit badly? “Yes. But China and North Asia had a very strong ecommerce business and digital infrastructure so sales there were not as badly hit as in India,” he says.
“By the time I came back in 2023, India had a different consumer, and a different digital stack which was clearly working well. It opened up an amazing opportunity for us,” he says.
But didn’t the pandemic also bring in its wake more competition for L’Oréal in the form of the hundreds of new D2C beauty brands that took off in India. “It was great news as far as we were concerned,” he responds. “India is a country of over a billion and the beauty market here is worth just 7 billion euros annually. That is 7 Euros per person per year, probably one of the lowest in the world. For example, in Indonesia it is 25 Euros. So, there is so much headroom for growth in India. D2C brands are helping the overall beauty industry expand,” he says.
Has L’Oréal looked to acquire any of the D2C brands? “Not yet. Though acquisition is part of the playbook in growing in countries. We look at opportunities regularly,” responds Kaushik.
So far, the growth in India has been purely organic and L’Oréal is the number two beauty player in the country, just behind Unilever. And now growth is accelerating. In recent years, L’Oréal launched its luxury products in India – these are fronted by brands like YSL, Lancôme, fragrances like Armani, Prada, Diesel, etc. “That’s how we have 26 brands here – most of the popular fragrances you see at department stores are from L’Oréal,” says Kaushik.
Last year, L’Oréal also launched its dermatological beauty division in India with the brand CeraVe, and Kaushik is upbeat about this. The consumers to dermatology ratio is lowest in India, he says, and the company is looking to change that.
Big bet on tech
He also passionately describes the big bet on beauty tech that L’Oréal made globally a decade ago. “With consumers fully connected and digitally buying, L’Oréal anticipated this eight to ten years ago, introducing virtual try-ons and other tech offerings,” says Kaushik. It acquired Modiface in 2018, a global leader in augmented reality and AI for the beauty industry . “Through our skin scans available virtually, you can get a personalised regime and routine for products that will be recommended to you,” says Kaushik.
He also describes how the L’Oréal GPT app empowers all its employees to make any decisions. “It’s developed in-house. Not too many companies have things like this. What AI does is to accelerate our creatives, help decode our consumers with all the information and data we have, and leverage technologies to be very precise in our offerings to every consumer. India is leveraging these to offer beauty for each, versus beauty for all,” he sums up.
One per cent of L’Oréal’s massive global turnover is ploughed into R&D. India has two R&D centres - in Mumbai and Bangalore - with scientists working on creating specific formulations for Indian consumer needs. So, has any product from India made it to the world? Says Kaushik, “An India specific creation on Garnier men, which has gone international, was developed and produced in India. On hair colour we developed affordable sachets called Garnier Black Natural in India. This tech is also being launched in Europe this year. “
By now it is time for Kaushik to head to the airport. He has barely touched his plate of rolls, you note. Any quirky hobby, you ask him? And then get enchanted with his answer. An avid biker, once in a while he takes a complete break for 8-10 days, as he journeys on his Royal Enfield without a plan, disconnecting from everything “much to the irritation of his team,” he says with a grin. “I go solo. I choose a direction and head there without using Google maps and stopping where I fancy, turning right or left on a whim, not booking hotels, but camping or staying at someone’s house.”
Ever since he took over as MD India, he says he has not been able to do this disconnection trip. “Hopefully soon,” he says, taking his leave.