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February 12, 2026
Vaeshnavi Kasthuril, Mint
Bengaluru, 6 February 2026
Global fragrance maker Bath & Body Works Inc. is betting on a reset to revive growth after years of heavy discounting and weak product innovation dulled its brand momentum across markets. The Columbus, Ohio-based retailer is pivoting to a “consumer-first” formula strategy centered around upgraded formulations, more disciplined marketing, and fewer promotions.
The reset matters as India is emerging as one of the company’s fastest-growing and best-performing markets and is also becoming a testing ground for how the brand evolves its retail model. India now ranks among Bath & Body Works’ top five international markets by growth.
“We’re seeing strong engagement across stores (in India), digital marketplaces and even quick commerce, which gives us confidence as we evolve the brand and introduce more innovation,” said Tony Garrison, global vice president at Bath & Body Works, in an interview with Mint.
The fragrance maker entered India in 2018 in partnership with Dubai-based Apparel Group and has since expanded to about 50 stores across major metros, while also building an online presence through platforms such as Nykaa, Myntra, and Amazon. Apparel Group brings over 80 global brands to India, including Victoria’s Secret, Charles & Keith, Aldo, Crocs, and Tim Hortons.
“We’re learning a lot from how the Indian consumer shops across platforms, especially the speed and convenience expectations,” Garrison said. “It’s helping us think differently about assortment, pack sizes and how we show up digitally”.
Even as discretionary spending softened, the brand’s franchise partner, Apparel Group, delivered double-digit sales growth in India and high single-digit comparable store gains in FY25. It reported a 26% year-on-year jump in FY25 revenue to ₹1,118 crore and a net profit of ₹20.5 crore, reversing a loss in the previous year.
Globally, Bath & Body Works’ earnings reflect soft consumer demand as well as margin pressures. Its revenue declined 1% to $1.59 billion in the third quarter of FY25, while net income fell 27% year-on-year to $577 million.
Reviving the fragrance engine
While legacy scents such as Japanese Cherry Blossom, Champagne Toast, and Thousand Wishes remain global blockbusters, the company admits it hasn’t produced enough new hits at a similar scale in recent years. Japanese Cherry Blossom is a $250 million fragrance.
“I think we haven’t done the best job of keeping up with some of the fragrance trends. We haven’t done a lot of innovation, and that’s what you’re going to see this year. This is a big change year for us,” Garrison said.
The company plans to elevate its home fragrance portfolio, bringing in more premium candle collections, gift-ready packaging, and deeper, more sophisticated scent profiles. The broader goal is to encourage shoppers to trade up within the brand rather than wait for markdowns. “We want customers to see the value in the product itself… not just the promotion,” Garrison said.
New retail formats
To test new retail formats, the company and Apparel Group plan to pilot a small “neighbourhood store” format of roughly 500 square feet in select non-metro markets later this year. These stores will focus heavily on core body care lines and hero fragrances, while creating a more discovery-led environment for first-time shoppers.
India is also emerging as a key market in testing how far premiumisation can go. Garrison noted that the company has not seen a slowdown locally: “India has actually been one of our strongest markets in the post-Covid period. Even when consumers are careful, they still spend on small luxuries that make them feel good”.
What experts say
Retail experts caution that the reset in India won’t be without challenges. Devangshu Dutta, founder of Third Eyesight, noted that brands often fall back on discounting when volumes don’t come through. He added that the personal care market has become intensely crowded, making brand clarity critical.
While the brand is leaning into quick commerce and smaller stores, Dutta cautioned that premium brands still need larger formats to build experience-led differentiation. “Neighbourhood stores can be spokes, but you still need the hub—the large store—to communicate the brand experience,” he said.
Race Intensifies
The turnaround plan comes at a time when rivals, including The Body Shop and Forest Essentials, are also vying for the Indian consumer’s wallet. The Body Shop plans to achieve ₹1,100 crore in revenue in India within the next three to five years. India’s fragrance market was valued at $1.0 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a 13.9% CAGR to $3.23 billion by 2033.
(Published in Mint)
admin
March 20, 2025
Sagar Malviya, Economic Times
Mumbai, 20 March 2025
Established beauty product makers such as Forest Essentials, Colorbar, Kama Ayurveda, Body Shop, VLCC Personal Care and Lotus Herbals saw a slowdown in sales growth in FY24, according to the latest Registrar of Companies filings. Consumers favoured new-age rivals such as Minimalist and Pilgrim, specialised derma brands, as well as global labels Shiseido, Innisfree and Eucerin.
Sales growth of established brands mostly in the natural skincare segment, more than halved to single digits during the previous financial year amid a broader economic slump.
In contrast, companies such as L’Oreal, Nykaa and Sephora continued to grow at 12-34% on a significantly bigger base, even as they lost pace.
Direct-to-consumer brand Pilgrim more than doubled its sales, Minimalist’s revenue increased 80% and Foxtale’s sales surged 500% on a lower base.
“With most consumers tightening their budget on discretionary spends in FY24, they seem to have opted for brands that give instant benefits compared to natural products, which take time to be effective,” said Devangshu Dutta, founder of retail consulting firm Third Eyesight.
Over the past few years, there has been a flurry of beauty product launches, which have depended on platforms such as Nykaa and Tira for sales.
In the past two years, Nykaa has launched more than 350 brands, or In the past two years, or nearly one new label every alternate day on average.
This includes international brands such as CeraVe, Uriage and Versed, as well as home-grown brands such as Foxtale and Hyphen.
Reliance Retail, which entered beauty retailing with Tira two years ago, now sells nearly 1,000 brands, including exclusive labels such as Akind, Augustinus Badee, Allies of Skin, Kundal and Patchology.
“10 years ago we were only competing against big guys,” Vincent Karney, global chief executive of Beiersdorf, maker of Eucerin, Nivea and La Prakrit, told ET last month. “Now we have those local brands, and we have to become a bit more agile.”
On Nykaa, Fenty Beauty by Rihanna is the highest-selling brand in lipcare while Eucerin has become its biggest premium dermo-cosmetic serum. South Korean beauty brands Axis-Y, Tirtir and Numbuzin grew over 60% in 2024, with sales of toners increasing 104%, serums 45%, moisturisers 52% and sunscreens 154% on the platform.
VLCC and Colorbar did not respond to ET queries, while Forest Essentials was not reachable.
In January, Mike Jatania, cofounder and executive chairman of The Body Shop and Aurea Group, told ET, “There would be continuation of new entrants. Inflation is still a global issue and we will see the pressure. Competitive environment will be a challenge… 70% of our stores are showing decent growth. We have closed some stores and opened a few also, that’s the nature of the business.”
Ingredients Matter
Warnery of Beiersdorf emphasised the need to stay focused on “big innovation, by being able to talk to GenZ, (a position) which might be filled in by those local brands coming with basic ingredients.”
The likes of Minimalist, Ordinary and Pilgrim disclose active ingredients at a granular level, specifying the exact percentage of acid used in the product to appeal to GenZ users (those born between 1997 and early 2010s), who are said to be far more conscious of what they use on their skin compared to millennials (those born during 1980s to mid-1990s) and Gen X (those born from about 1965 to 1980).
Shoppers Stop, which manages brands such as Estee Lauder, Shiseido, Bobbi Brown, Mac and Clinique in India, sees the overall beauty market driven by companies focusing on consumers across age groups, and not just younger ones. Both natural and dermatological products are expected to find takers.
“While most new age brands tap younger cohorts, their pocket size allows them to mostly buy affordable products and the more affluent consumers opt for established global brands that have proven themselves since decades,” said Biju Kassim, chief executive, beauty, at Shoppers Stop. “Beauty is still not a habit in India and with hundreds of brands being launched, the focus is to grow penetration. There is also a shift from care to cure, driven by derma-recommended products and brands disclosing active ingredients, but it is still a niche sub-segment.”
Dutta of Third Eyesight sees the current trend as temporary. “We expect growth of (established) companies to bounce back in the current fiscal, driven by a strong demand for beauty,” he said, pointing especially to online platforms. India’s beauty and personal care market is expected to reach $34 billion by 2028, up from $21 billion now, driven by an online surge and a growing preference for high quality, premium beauty products according to a report by Nykaa and consulting firm Redseer.
Nicolas Hieronimus, chief executive of cosmetics giant L’Oreal, last year said consumers in India are more demanding and are not just settling for very basic things like putting an ingredient in a product such as salicylic acid or collagen. “That’s where L’Oreal has the best cards to play, and that’s where we really thrive,” he had told ET.
Beiersdorf, Unilever, L’Oreal and Shiseido, among the world’s largest cosmetics companies, have all identified India as a key growth driver, citing the burgeoning population and growing affinity for beauty products.
(Published in Economic Times)
Devangshu Dutta
June 2, 2008
When we began studying the basic fundamentals of marketing, our professor introduced us to the 4-P framework covering Product, Price, Place and Promotion created by “the Great P” of Marketing, Philip Kotler, whose textbooks are classics among marketing management studies.
In time, others modified it to 5-P, 6-P and 7-P, but the basic framework stands best on the original four legs defined by Kotler.
The principle is that to design an effective marketing strategy you need to:
If you are truly disciplined, you may then extend any of these into spider-webs of clearer attribute definition. For instance, when you get involved with defining the product it can start from “breakfast” and then be further defined by attributes such as taste (e.g. sweetened or unsweetened), texture (e.g. crunchy or wet), fullness (e.g. light or filling), and go further into the benefits (e.g. helpful in losing weight, or in gaining body mass) etc.
Given that the basic framework is straight-forward and simple to apply, when we ask the question “what is your marketing strategy”, it is surprising to get the answer: “advertising”. It gets somewhat more distressing when we interrogate further, when we examine what the advertising is focussed on: “cheaper prices than competition”.
Okay, let’s grant a couple of reality checks here. One is that most retailers and consumer goods companies in the current stage of the market’s growth want to grab the maximum possible market share in the minimum possible time. Two, if you want to get the attention of a lot of customers very quickly, shouting out a great price offer is one of the easiest ways to do it.
Which brings us to the basic issue: in the current market scenario, if you are a retailer or if you have a brand that you want to scale up fast, advertising extensively about the “great value” is highly likely to quickly give you the footfall and conversions you need.
But the question is, when does it stop being a good tactic and just becomes lazy marketing? And once it’s in that territory, when does it become dangerously weak even as a sustained tactic?
Imagine a scenario with me: the CEO strides into a marketing strategy meeting and says, “I want you to stop advertising the way you do. In fact, I want you to stop advertising, period. But I don’t want sales to drop and I don’t want our brand image to suffer.”
Shock, horror, dismay at the thought of “where is this company going”? Resignations, even, on the CEO’s table?
But just stay with that thought for a minute, and then look at Kotler’s framework again.
Let’s look at “product” holistically because, in the noise of high-decibel advertising about low prices, typically the definition of the “product” is the first to slip from attention. How the customer relates to the store, what her experience is as she walks through from the entrance to the check-out and beyond is part and parcel of the “product”. What does she think the store is about? Does her perception of the store’s “product” (the entire experience of shopping) match with the retailer’s own perception? Does the retailer even have a clear perception of his product?
Secondly, “place”. Sure, in-store product placement is frequently governed by the marketing function. But how many retailers have marketing involved in selecting the store location? A great store location is the best live, “walk-in advertisement” that a retailer can have. If a fashion brand like Zara can eschew advertising (founder Amancio Ortega has been quoted as saying that “advertising” is a distraction), and instead focus on its stores to create the traffic and the awareness about the brands, surely the store location should receive some attention from the marketing heads of food and grocery companies.
Let’s also reconsider how much connection there is between the marketing strategy and the store layout itself (in many cases it is not enough). Whether the customer likes wide aisles and a “clean” experience or prefers a chaotic environment, the store must make a statement that is in sync with the overall business strategy and the target customer. Good retailers understand this intuitively, but it is important also to express it overtly within the organisation and get the marketing team involved in the planning and execution. Further, once the customer is actually in the store, clear price ticketing, intuitive adjacencies and clean signage can make a tremendous difference in converting walk-ins to purchases.
Let’s leave price alone for this inquiry because, whether high or low, it gets a lot of attention anyway, and let’s move to promotion.
If we define marketing’s role as getting customers into the store and getting them to buy, then the surely promotion is the driver of the marketing engine. But does promotion necessarily have to mean advertising?
We’ve discussed Zara’s example of using the stores as the medium of promotion. Another thing that works for Zara is word of mouth publicity, as well as the humongous amount of publicity the company gets due to its business model. (Other interesting companies, such as Pantaloon, Reliance, Wal-Mart, The Body Shop etc. also enjoy promotion through publicity.)
Pizza companies use cost-effective menu flyers dropped at the customer’s door and “box toppers” to drive the next purchase (yes, of course, they also advertise hugely, but during their lean years when they have had to reduce advertising, it is the flyers and box-toppers that have kept them going.) Direct selling companies can also offer some learnings about creating and sustaining interest, as do entrepreneurial start-ups. As a matter of fact, think of the last time you saw an advertisement of the most popular “unbranded” take-away in your area. Ever?
It may be time for us to dust off the notes from the Marketing 101 class, and re-examine what we do.
