What Priyanka Gill teaches about brand purpose

I mean we love social media. We are a brand that was built and that thrives on social media. We generally believe that you should go where the user is. Every time we meet you there's new news and lots of things that you're doing which are breaking or defining categories. So from content to community, the influencer platform to commerce and now private labels. I know it's been a journey of breaking ground but how does it all work together? How does it all come together?

It all comes together because at the center and heart of everything that we do is content. So whether we are writing a story, a video, influencer content or even creating the cream or the aloe vera gel that our users should buy, content is at the heart of all of that. And as long as that's a true north. So everything is content first and rest is just a way of expressing an idea. And is there now lots of data and learning and machines that have come into place which are putting the influencer network, the data, the products, the communication together?

So data plays a very very important part in pretty much everything that we do. Right from it informing the kind of content that we create, how we distribute the content that we have, even what should the name of a product be. So all of that is basically insights that we have into user engagement data on our platform. And so if tomorrow if I want to create a t-shirt I can just look at a best-selling meme and that best-selling meme can be the basis of a t-shirt. You just take a simple idea for example, Women Rock, right?

Women Rock was a meme that did really well. We can do an article on that, we can do a video on that. I can even take out t-shirts, clocks, doormats, just say Women Rock. It's more if I wanted to kind of even name one of my makeup lines or lipstick after Women Rock, that would be possible as well. So content is at the heart of everything that we do. And as long as we create engaging content, how we manifest it as an article, video, story, product, it's immaterial. Will advertising and branded content remain part of the revenue stack or as you go along,

do you expect commerce to actually become the mainstay of how the company grows? We started our monetizing journey for branded content and advertising. I think that's always going to be important. And as the market grows, as India grows, as everything else kind of goes up, that part will keep growing. We do pretty much 100-150% year on year is how that bit grows for us. So that will obviously continue. E-commerce, our private label is very, very exciting. And we think it's going to be a really strong contributor to our revenue.

I mean, it is already now, but I think that's going to grow really, really fast as well. Where do you think the competitive advantage from e-commerce comes from? Is it the communities? Is it the focus on audience? Is it everything that you've learned about women, about millennial women? Or is it simply the fact that nobody else is doing enough? Honestly, we are competing with established, say in the beauty segment, we're competing with established brands. We're competing with our peers who are now getting funded in the DTC space as well.

What we have is 43 million monthly active users who love the PopXO brand. We have this enormous marketing machinery that's been in action for the past five years that allows us to market many, many different concepts to our users effectively as well. Most importantly, we have millions and millions of engagement data points on what we should be doing. So you put all these three things together, it puts us in the best place to create the next generation of direct-to-consumer brands for women in the country.

We have the women on our platform, we know exactly what they're looking for, what they want. We know what drives their interest and how to engage them. And that gets you to creating a large DTC brand. A lot of that also therefore means customers and consumers both, who are homegrown, who are organic and who are on the platform. Is there a conscious effort to reduce dependence on social media and on the peripheral ecosystem for each? I mean, we love social media. We are a brand that was built and that thrives on social media.

We generally believe that you should go where the user is. You know that she's on Facebook, you know she's on Instagram, she's on Pinterest, she's on YouTube and she's on PopXO as well. So that same cream that I want to sell will be sold across all the platforms in different ways. As long as it leads to a sale, we are fairly platform agnostic. The important thing is we've built our large communities on each of those platforms as well. So it's really easy for me to re-engage that user and show her a new product that I want to sell to her.

So yeah, we love social media. Lots of the girls, lots of the women, millennial women who've grown up with the brand, grow older, are growing older with the brand. Their life stages change, their preferences change, possibly behaviour changes. Is the brand getting older, more mature as this tribe of women grows older? Or does it remain young and sort of... So when she discovered PopXO for the first time, which was almost six years ago now, she was probably in her first, second year of college.

And now she's finished college, she's probably either done a masters, first job, she's probably dating, married. So she's been through multiple life stages in the past, kind of five, six years. And PopXO has also grown with her in many ways as well. Because she finds that way of PopXO content that is interesting to her in that life space. Because we kind of create content across many, many different types of categories as well. But we're also looking at different things that we can do. Parenting is something that I'm personally obsessing about right now.

And a lot of our users are entering that zone as well. There's nothing large that's happening in parenting in India at the moment. So that probably would be the next frontier on a much, much larger scale that we'd want to kind of go after. But yeah, whatever she's doing at whatever life stage that she's doing it at, we want to be an important part of her conversation.