Momentum is intoxicating until you drown in it: Darpan Sanghvi on Good Glamm Group’s collapse

 New Delhi: Darpan Sanghvi, founder of The Good Glamm Group, has offered a public and introspective account of the company’s collapse, attributing its undoing to what he describes as a “Momentum Trap”. 

In a LinkedIn post and accompanying document titled “The Momentum (Trap)”, Sanghvi outlined how the pursuit of aggressive growth across multiple fronts ultimately created structural fragility.

Once a prominent figure in India’s D2C and digital FMCG sector, Sanghvi said the business faltered not because of a single misstep but due to the simultaneous execution of too many initiatives, at high speed, and at a large scale.

“Momentum is intoxicating. Until you drown in it,” Sanghvi wrote. “At first, momentum feels like your greatest ally... But if you stop steering, it drags you faster and faster until you can’t breathe.”

Central to the group’s expansion strategy was a rapid series of acquisitions, 11 in total, within a short period. Sanghvi said the integration of multiple companies with distinct operational styles and leadership structures created internal complexity and strategic drift.

The group also entered five beauty and personal care categories without consolidating its presence in any one of them. Alongside this, it built a tech-led direct-to-consumer platform, expanded into traditional offline retail, and invested in a separate media and creator vertical.

“Our focus shattered, despite constantly investing, resources were always stretched thin, chasing too many battles to win any of them,” he noted.

According to Sanghvi, the company attempted to condense a decade of growth into two years. Revenue reportedly rose from Rs 50 crore to Rs 640 crore during this period, but losses increased at a similar rate. Ten acquisitions were completed in nine months, and offline operations were expanded across 50 cities. In one quarter alone, the company onboarded 1,000 employees.

“Every day was a sprint, every hour a deadline, every minute... breathless,” he wrote.

This pace, Sanghvi argued, created conditions where integration and learning were sidelined in favour of velocity, leading to decisions that proved unsustainable over time.

The third pressure point came from scaling untested initiatives before validating their fundamentals. Shop-in-shop formats were rolled out in 50 cities, and monthly DTC orders were increased from 100,000 to 1.5 million without fully optimising unit economics.

He added that attempting to nationalise all five brands at once also resulted in diluted marketing efforts and increased operational strain.

Sanghvi suggests that maintaining pace and ambition could have been feasible if strategic focus or timelines had been moderated.

Beyond operational decisions, Sanghvi reflected on the emotional fallout of the venture’s collapse. He described losing touch with the team members who were part of the company’s earliest milestones and spoke of the difficulty in slowing down long enough to take stock.

“Some of those memories are proud. Many are painful. All of them are highly emotional,” he wrote. “Each of them with incredible team members who believed in me... but instead I let each of them down as I drowned in our self-perpetuated momentum.”

The Good Glamm Group is being dismantled as lenders move to sell its portfolio of brands individually. 

Founded in 2015 by Sanghvi, Priyanka Gill, and Naiyya Saggi, Good Glamm rose to prominence with a $1.26 billion valuation in 2021, becoming one of India’s first beauty-commerce unicorns. 

The company built a house of brands through aggressive acquisitions, including MyGlamm, Sirona, The Moms Co., Organic Harvest, St. Botanica, POPxo, and ScoopWhoop, backed by high-profile investors like Warburg Pincus, Prosus Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners. However, mounting debt, high operational costs, and a failure to achieve profitability have led to its unravelling.

The company’s financial troubles intensified after a critical acquisition deal fell through in early 2025, when the CEO of the acquiring company stepped down, leaving Good Glamm without a vital funding lifeline. This triggered cash flow issues, resulting in delayed salary payments for April and May 2025 and unpaid dues to vendors and former employees. The group’s valuation has plummeted to approximately $120 million, a 90% drop from its peak, with liabilities estimated at Rs 250 crore.

Good Glamm has already sold several brands at significant losses. In February 2025, it divested feminine hygiene brand Sirona to its original founders for Rs 150 crore, a third of the Rs 450 crore acquisition cost in 2023. Digital media platform ScoopWhoop was sold to Bengaluru-based WLDD for Rs 18–20 crore, down from Rs 100 crore in 2021, and MissMalini Entertainment was offloaded to Creativefuel for Rs 4 crore. 

The company is now exploring sales of remaining brands, including The Moms Co., Organic Harvest, and POPxo, though analysts predict these may fetch low valuations due to market conditions and operational challenges.