Beauty and Wellness startup Belita looks to raise Series A to scale and take monthly revenues to INR 1 crore

Belita is a Spanish word which means ‘little beauty’ and the company is a professional beauty and wellness company that provides its services to women in the comfort of their homes. The company was founded in late 2010 by Garima Jain because of a problem she herself faced. Garima was a working professional at a finance company where long hours was the norm and she hardly found anytime for personal relaxation or grooming. By the time she had some time at her hands, the saloons used to shut down and this was the grievance that led to the founding of Belita.

Garima’s husband had turned an entrepreneur a year before their marriage and he was very supportive of the idea. “This industry in India was completely unorganized and there was no single company in the country offering doorstep salon and spa services,” thought Garima and took the plunge to startup.

Belita secured funding from India Quotient in 2012 and this helped them to accelerate growth. Deep Singh is the business head for Belita and the team strength stands at 50 as of now. Belita has 3 Logistic centres for regular beauty & Spa services via which it offers its services across Mumbai right from 6.30 in the morning to 9.30 in the night.

“Our USP is the ability to replicate rich experience of a Salon and deliver it at customer’s convenience not just at their place but also being available for 15 hours a day,” says Garima. “With over 3 years of experience, we have been able to devise technology enabled ecosystem backed with Proprietary procedures and Process & Quality Control mechanism, which has also helped us stay ahead of our competition,” she adds.

The journey has been tough for Garima and team but they’ve managed to serve 7500+ customers, 240+ brides, 78+ weddings and 55+ pamper parties in Mumbai till now. “The initial set of challenges in Operations, HR and Quality control were daunting but we’ve been able to overcome them,” says Garima. Belita serves 850-900 customers in a month and rakes in about INR 12 lakhs of revenues. Garima and team is now looking to raise a Series A to take up revenues to INR 1 crore a month and expand into more cities starting with Pune, Bangalore and Ahmedabad. "With some more infusion of funds, we believe we can take up revenues to the 1 crore mark in 20 months," says Garima.

75% of the customers for Belita are repeat customers and the team aspires to make Belita India’s no. 1 chain to deliver Beauty Services at doorstep. We also asked Garima about some of the biggest learnings from running her business for three years:

• We should not look for best solution of the problem every time and kill our time in finding that. Quick decision making & and high speed of execution is the key in a startup. Improvisation every quarter will cost much less.
• First build the team, then build the case and then you can demand better and bigger.
• We should give Right targets to the team and never lose out on measuring or monitoring that diligently, sometimes we make a mistake of measuring it by mere dedication and number of hours in the work. It has to be strictly objective and once it's measured, incentivising and appreciating effectively people should be the key task in the to-do list.

Website: Belita