Before there was a business plan, there was lip balm.
Not the kind you buy — the kind you make at 2am in your hostel room because the shade you wanted didn't exist yet. That was me, years before "brand strategist" was anywhere near my job title. I didn't know it then, but that was the first M&M Strat8 brief I ever wrote — for myself.
Then came the part nobody puts on a vision board: the rigor. Years at TCS Strategy and PwC Strategy&, learning that great instincts mean nothing without a framework to scale them. Consulting taught me to ask the boring questions — the ones that save a brand from a beautiful, expensive mistake.
Then I went and did the thing consultants usually just advise on. I got in — four years inside the business of beauty, as Brand Marketing Head at Suganda and Senior Brand Marketing Manager at Deconstruct, owning the work from the first ideation meeting to the moment it hit a shelf. Not the strategy slide. The whole thing.
Some of that work paid off in ways I still find slightly unbelievable. A runner-up finish at Beauty & You — Nykaa and Estée Lauder's own venture program. A Guinness World Record, earned through an execution challenge with a 92% rejection rate (yes, we were the 8%). And a 100% revenue uplift in the serum category — twice, for two different brands, which is the part that told me this wasn't luck.
Here's what four years inside the business taught me that no consulting deck ever could: a brand only works if the product actually works. Strategy can make people curious. It cannot make a serum perform. The two have to be true at the same time, or the whole thing collapses on review #47.
That's the entire reason M&M Strat8 exists. Not as another agency with a moodboard and a media plan — but as a partner who's sat on both sides of the table: the strategist's chair and the brand owner's chair, at 11pm, three days before launch, wondering if any of it will work.
It will. We've done it before. Let's do it again — for you, and for the next chapter of Indian beauty, standing as confidently as K-beauty, J-beauty, and the European houses always have.
Reach out directly or leave your email and we'll come to you.