SUGAR Cosmetics, though now amongst the most popular and fastest growing cosmetics brand in India, wasn’t the first choice when Vineeta was asked to name her new cosmetics company, and neither was cosmetics the first business that Vineeta undertook when she set out to be an entrepreneur.

Getting SUGAR to it’s users was a tumultuous journey and as Vineeta sits down with Rohin to recount some of the most important points in the journey, we get a peek at the lenses she uses to look at the world around her.

If you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or rants, please email them to [email protected] We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

Full episode transcript

Rohin
So, Vineeta, you are in a book with other IIT Madras graduates which you are, you’re an IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad graduate of entrepreneurs and you are the only woman in that list. Tell us about the question that you got.

Vineeta
Okay, so there was a bunch of students who were writing that book and it’s called IITM Nexus and there are 16 IIT Madras entrepreneurs stories and one of them is, you know, the story of SUGAR and when the first question in that conversation from the student who was writing this book was that, isn’t it like cliched that, you know, there’s just one woman from IIT Madras in this list and of all the businesses, she’s running a cosmetics business?

so… and I remember at that moment, you know, it was for me like an entire flashback of like, you know the… my IIT journey and beyond where I would always work the hardest and, you know, always like fight the hardest and every single time I would accomplish something, there would be an attribution that this is either like diversity quota or it is, you know, she got it because she’s a woman and, you know, for me like this question sort of summed up this whole thing that no matter how hard you fight and, you know, there’ll always be somebody who, you know, come to you and question everything you’ve accomplished with a sweeping statement like that and make it your job to keep proving your worth and that was the moment where, you know, of course when I responded to him I told him that like really trying to prove my worth and trying to explain to you why I’m doing this business is something I don’t want to get into because I love building what I’m building. I love my job and I wouldn’t do anything (else) in this world and just because it’s a cliche to you, you know, I don’t want it to discredit from all the work that I’ve put in so far and there are a ton of IIT Madras women who are running agri tech businesses and SaaS companies and, you know, so it’s not my job to, like, prove that women can be equally good at engineering talent or building tech businesses because, you know, those women will emerge as well.