Last week, the Good Glamm Group’s founder, Darpan Sanghvi, announced that the content-to-commerce company, which had been struggling with financial constraints, is being dismantled after lenders decided to take legal recourse against individual brands that constitute the group. According to Sanghvi’s post on LinkedIn, the brands will cease to exist under a single entity and will be sold one by one to be operated individually. 

The dismantling marks the culmination of an eight-year journey for one of the most well-known names in the Indian startup landscape, which has straddled the worlds of commerce—with D2C personal care and beauty brands like Sirona, The Moms Co., and Organic Harvest—and content—with brands like ScoopWhoop, POPxo, and Miss Malini. Its last valuation was a little over a billion dollars, having achieved the unicorn status in 2021 with a valuation of $1.2 billion. It also raised more than $400 million from some of the most marquee investors in India, including Warburg Pincus, Accel, Amazon, Bessemer Ventures, and Ascent Capital. The company, in its halcyon years, was also planning to go public by 2023.

However, it all came crashing down for the company. Its plans to build a “house of brands” backfired to a spiralling extent, from which it could never recover. When the money came rolling in during the pandemic years, as investors turned bullish on the Indian startup ecosystem, the Good Glamm Group redoubled its efforts on a highly ambitious strategy of building a boutique of brands that it believed aligned with its vision. 

To fructify this strategy, it made a flurry of expensive acquisitions, which included an all-cash acquisition of Sirona for ₹450 crore, acquiring The Moms Co. for ₹500 crore in a mix of cash and stock, and becoming a majority shareholder in the Organic Harvest, which was then valued at ₹250 crore. During the dizzying highs of fundraising, Sanghvi told TechCrunch in an interview that he was targeting a mammoth $10 billion listing. “To achieve that listing, I need to do at least ₹3,000 crore of revenue and ₹500-600 crore of EBIDTA. If I hit this mark, I do not see any reason why, when we are growing at 50 percent year on year, we can’t get to a decacorn IPO. But all of this is what we are working towards. Let’s see where we land,” he said.

In hindsight, many believe that while the company raised millions and went on a shopping spree, it did so purely on the basis of hypotheses and projections. This made the company bear the brunt of Murphy’s Law in the startup ecosystem. By 2022, the world had become a lot different from what it was during the pandemic years. The Covid-19 pandemic was slowly receding in the rearview mirror, with interest rates rising. This, in tandem with a wartorn world with armed conflicts in Ukraine—followed by the Gaza Strip—had investors turning risk-averse, with apprehensions about taking bets on startups that were still pitching projections instead of achieved numbers. This apprehension soon metamorphosed into a full-blown funding winter, with most investors holding onto dry powder. 

Consequently, startups that were heavily reliant on burning cash and funding began to falter, and the Good Glamm Group was no different. Its ambitious plan to scale using investor money was tossed aside, as showing a path to profitability that could convince investors became a priority to feed the cash-burning entity that it had become by then. But by then, despite an increase in revenue, its losses ballooned to ₹916 crore in FY23 from ₹362 crore in FY22.

Sanghvi has also admitted that several of the acquisitions and decisions he made in the past failed to turn out as he had hoped. “As the founder, this is on me—the decisions, the choices that didn’t work, the risks that didn’t pay off,” he wrote in his long-winded post on LinkedIn. Sanghvi had also told The Economic Times sometime in 2024 that MyGlamm, one of the earliest companies in the Good Glamm Group that predated the group’s founding, offers home beauty and spa services—still making a majority of 35-40% of its total revenue, while other acquired brands contribute 15-17% each.

This admission has also led many to argue that the company overpaid for the acquisition and lacked a clear business model that could be accretive to the company’s financials. What made things go from bad to worse for the Good Glamm Group was that the founders of the companies it acquired in the shopping spree began leaving. Priyanka Gill of POPxo, who was also appointed as the co-founder of the Good Glamm Group, has left for Kalaari Capital. Some of the other high-profile exits include Mohit Sadaani of The Moms Co. and Deep Bajaj and Mohit Bajaj of Sirona.

But perhaps nothing was more damning than allegations of sexual assault against Sattvik Mishra, the CEO of ScoopWhoop, one of the better-known content platforms in the company’s portfolio, which was once touted as India’s answer to BuzzFeed. The allegations, levelled by Samdish Bhatia, a popular online news anchor, came to light right after ScoopWhoop was acquired by the Good Glamm Group. While it remains to be seen if the allegations have any truth to them, they have made for bad optics for the company. 

Yet, all of it came to nothing, as the Good Glamm Group, which had defaulted on vendor payments and salaries, was in the market to offload assets. It has sold ScoopWhoop to marketing firm WLDD for ₹20 crore, less than a third of its 2021 valuation of ₹60-70 crore. Sirona, one of the priciest acquisitions, was sold back to its founders in February, with its valuation pruned to between ₹150 and 200 crore. The Good Glamm Group is reportedly in advanced talks to sell MissMalini, a media and influencer talent management network, for a paltry ₹4 crore, compared to its valuation of ₹60-70 crore when it was acquired in 2021.

The unbecoming of the Good Glamm Group is yet another cautionary tale of startups trying to aggressively grow without any foresight or longevity of their business models, relying solely on projections and hypotheses, with the hope that out of all possible scenarios, things will turn out in their favour.