At A Glance 

At Wander Beauty, former investment banker Divya Gugnani showcases how innate business sense can drive a successful launch and growth. This is a story about invention, growing a business, and adhering to customer-centric principles; it's about more than just makeup. Watch to learn how Wander Beauty rose to prominence as the go-to brand for carefree beauty!

Who is Divya?

Meet Divya Gugnani, Founder of Wander Beauty!

About Wander Beauty

Founded in 2015 by Divya Gugani and Lindsay Ellingson, Wander Beauty creates effortless and multifunctional makeup essentials that allows even the busiest of women to be gorgeous on the go. From mascara and foundation to lipstick and blush, the beauty brand shortens your makeup routine to help you feel your best and give you more time to do the things you love.

Divya’s Journey

Divya started her career in investment banking, working at Goldman Sachs for two years, and she loved every minute. Then, she began investing in late-stage businesses and worked in private equity. She later switched to early-stage companies to work in venture capital. During this moment of her journey, Divya got bit by the entrepreneurial bug. 

Since then, she has co-founded and served as CEO of five different businesses, with Wander Beauty as her fourth. Prior to focusing on Wander Beauty, she sold two other companies. The first was an auto parts company, and the second was Send the Trend, a business that featured an algorithm that worked as intelligent shopping recommendation technology. Eleven months later, Divya and her team sold the company to QVC.

Divya has found a niche in the ideation lifecycle, finding white space in the market, launching and building a company into a brand, growing it, scaling it, and selling it. Before creating Wander Beauty, she found that the most successful business founders also work as investors. As a mother of two who is close in age, she wanted quick and easy DIY beauty products that would allow her to present herself the best way every day, even when life got busy. Because there was a gap in the market for those types of products that prioritized clean beauty practices, Divya created a brand that would do the job. She and Lindsay Ellingson co-founded Wander Beauty and launched the brand in May 2015. 

Overall, Divya loves the connection with the consumer most regarding E-Commerce. When you build a digital storefront, you can connect directly with the customer and take charge of the entire visual identity of how they experience your brand. 

The Wander Beauty Team

Wander Beauty has a handful of core team members who work in New York City; others work remotely, Divya included. While she’s based in Miami, the team also has someone who lives in California, others in the Midwest, and some based internationally. The company also has off-shore talent agents in the Philippines who supplement the full-time team. 

The CX Philosophy at Wander Beauty

From day one of the company, Wander Beauty has had a customer-first mentality. Divya and Lindsay created the brand with the customer in mind. While brainstorming the brand, the two surveyed 100 women aged 18 to 72, asking them what the pain points were in the makeup routine. Many of the respondents said that there were too many products. Instead, the women wanted multifunctional products they could use on the go. This is how Wander Beauty was born; it was created to promote the idea of being gorgeous on the go. Divya and Lindsey worked to include the customer throughout the whole brand-making process, from the ideation stage to launch and further on to the product delivery.

The team keeps close contact with customers through surveys, social media, polls, and SMS, ensuring that the company has multiple touchpoints with customers to hear their feedback and involve them in every step of the journey. 

Overall, the Wander Beauty team believes in customer-centric service. It all starts with the customer, and the company understands the importance of discovering the customer’s needs and continuously improving products that align with what the customer wants to see from the brand.

“The full 360 loop has been very important,” Divya says. “Customer-centric customer service is what we believe in. It all starts with the customer, find out her needs, find her pain points, create fro her, build with her, tweak with her, fix with her, iterate with her.”

Using Automation to Ensure a Consistent Experience

Simply put, the Wander Beauty team uses a lot of automation because it makes sense. By setting up touchpoints with customers, the company has many educational flows that help the team set goals for improvement. Customer journeys are done through automated emails, and the CX team puts together flows for this. The company also uses an agency that handles customer requests and inquiries with a quick response time. 

Divya says that the team has specific metrics they try to meet, such as time limits, interaction time amounts, and sending comprehensive responses. Additionally, the team has an in-house chemist in case customers have questions about formulations or product ingredients. Lastly, the team has built extensive modules for frequently asked questions to which representatives are trained to respond consistently. Customers can answer a post-purchase survey for the company to track feedback and the team uses Zendesk to monitor weekly interactions and team member rankings.

Wander Beauty’s Growth Strategies

Fostering Innovation

As a leader, Divya believes the number one thing you can do is model the behavior you want to see in your team. For instance, if a leader wants their team to come in early, they must come in early. They have to work hard if they want their team to work hard. If they want their team to innovate, the leader must be innovative to lead the charge. Divya and Lindsey created the original formulations on their own, including a mascara that lasts longer and multifunctional double-sided products that could be used for four different purposes — lipstick, blush, eyeshadow, and highlighter. That drive for innovation created a lot of value for Wander Beauty customers because it saved them time, space, and money.

“If you create value for the customer, continue to innovate and push the ball forward as a leader, innovate the packaging, innovate the delivery, and innovate the formulation, then the team can take that and innovate across their areas,” she says. “When you take the charge as a leader to innovate from inception, I think then that innovation flows throughout the organization.”

Wander Beauty’s Journey to Success

In the company’s early days, the team experienced wildfire growth because the makeup sector was on fire at the time. First, Wander Beauty launched with makeup and skincare and grew rapidly in revenue. The company had years of 329% yearly growth, and it continued to be strong as the years went on. As far as the team goes, the company kept the headcount lean.

Divya says the market's momentum contributed to the brand’s initial success. The company partnered with the right retailers early on, like Sephora, Ipsy, and BoxyCharm. The team also built a lot of brand awareness, working with sampling boxes and other platforms to get the brand on the map. Additionally, Wander Beauty worked with influencers, which wasn’t a thing yet for most brands. The company contacted small content creators, influencers, and bloggers to have them experience the growing brand and its products. Then, the team took those voices and the narrative the creators shared on social media about their experiences with the brand and wove it together to craft its story.

“We did a lot of outreach, and it was a 360 funnel. It was press. It was reaching out to beauty editors and reaching out to celebrities… it was a lot of grassroots outreach that occurred across traditional marketing, digital marketing, influencer marketing, press, and all of it together with retail marketing as well,” she says.

Divya says the team wasn’t worried about building profit at first. Rather, it was focused on building reach, scale, and revenue growth, but COVID changed everything.

Before, the team thought they would have consistent three-digit growth every year, but as retail outlets and warehouses closed, physical retail divisions began pouring more money into D2C brands. Divya said this made investing in D2C challenging, and the return on advertising spending declined dramatically. 

Since then, the company has striven to recover and grow from the economic challenges that came about during the height of the pandemic. The pandemic also made the team realize they had to make the company sustainable to become profitable rather than depend on outside capital. Now, Wander Beauty is back to having a growth year—the team is up double digits in terms of revenue and profitability. They have grown because the team has focused on economies of scale, efficiency, and product development efficiency to focus on profitability.

“It’s been a wild ride,” Divya says. “When you’re growing rapidly, you think that it’s never going to stop… the rollercoaster will continue. It takes something out of your hands, like COVID, to fundamentally change your business principles and take the opportunity to understand the mechanics of your brand, your business, and your unit economics to rethink and make it work again.”

Ensuring Customer Retention

Divya says that different makeup and skincare categories have varying customer retention rates. For instance, when it comes to mascara, customers find a great product that works well for their lashes and gives them length, definition, and volume. Usually, they return every 30, 60, or 90 days. As for Wander Beauty, the company has a high customer retention rate, hitting almost 60%. This is because the makeup industry is where people tend to return for the products they need, like mascara, complexion, foundation, and concealer. When customers find what they like, they return to purchase the product repeatedly.

Furthermore, delivering exceptional innovation, quality, formulation, and performance allows customers to test out a product and try different brands. Eventually, they come back because the quality is there. People will buy something once for marketing but won’t repeat purchases unless the quality is there.

Elevating to the Next Level

Everyone on the team has a word that symbolizes what they want to achieve over the year, and Divya’s word is growth. The company’s number one goal is growth, and it wants to grow in every way possible—increasing revenue, profitability, customer base, organic touchpoints with the brand, reach, community, and even more.

In the long term, Divya says the goal is to create an evergreen and timeless brand that continues to promote the company's core ethos, helping customers become gorgeous on the go with fuss-free, foolproof, DIY beauty that travels wherever they wander.

“Our number one goal is growth,” Divya says. “We’re back to growing and we want to be growing everything. That means growing revenue, growing profitability, growth the customer base, growing organic touch points with the brand, growing our reach, growing our community, growth, growth, growth. That’s the mantra.”

Advice for Entrepreneurs

Creating a business is like building a house. It always takes longer than what you initially anticipated and costs more money. Divya says if you’re going to start and think the plan will cost you X amount of money, it will cost you 20% more. Entrepreneurs should be prepared to put in the excess effort necessary to build a successful business from the ground up.

“[Building a business always takes longer than what you anticipated and it costs more money,” Divya says. “If you’re going to start out and you think the plan says it’s going to cost you X, it’s going to cost you 20% more than X. Be ready for that.”