Milk Makeup has landed in India to find more beauty inspiration

What prompted you to launch Milk in India?

We listen to our community; it is very vocal about what market they want us to go next. We also saw that many people were buying our make up when travelling to New York or Europe. So we realised that this would be a great market for us.

We are a New York City-born-and-raised brand, we do products for diverse cultures because our city is so diverse and our community that we built around Milk is so diverse. There's such a rich history and culture here in India. We thought that it would be a great fit for our point of view around beauty and products. Also because Sephora is here; it's an incredible global partner for us.

The Milk community is not so much a demographic, but a psychographic. It's a kind of person—usually city-based—quick, fast, they work, they go out afterwards to meet their friends, and have 10 minutes to do their make up, usually in the back of a taxi cab. We feel like the fast pace of Mumbai and New Delhi is perfect for us. We are a New York City brand, we share the same energy of the big city. There's a lot of synergy between the Mumbai and the Delhi girl and the New York City girl.

What's your plan when it comes to engaging with the audience?

Influencer marketing has been a staple of how we communicate. We were very early in the US to be part of influencer marketing and also built a community of content creators that told our story and made it their own. It’s no different here. India has a very rich KOLs (key opinion leaders) (segment). For us, it has always been more important to have a million people who have a thousand followers talk about us than to have someone that's got five to 10 million followers.

The dream is that India inspires something in us and we know it will, and then we create products that we bring to the rest of the world.

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Could you tell us a bit about the changes that the brand has made over the years to make it clean?

When we first launched, we were told that no one cares about clean beauty. It’s different today. Clean and sustainable is always evolving, you're never good enough. At the end of the day, we still create products that we put out into the world, so we have to continuously work on it. It's not something that you just say, “okay we're good here". With new products and technologies, plastic and paper, we will continue to evolve with them.

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What is the best way to tackle the waste generated by the beauty industry?

Ultimately, it's creating products that are sustainable themselves. With consumer products, it's a little bit more difficult because there is usage, and then you're left with the component, you're left with the paper. You have to make sure that recyclability is as easy as possible. The plastic components of one package need to be the same so you don't need to take them apart. You have to do everything you can to make it easy for the consumer to recycle and that's very difficult. We're not the best at it, we still need to work on it. 

Have the boundaries between skincare and makeup merged?

Yes, especially with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, it is one routine for them. Good skin is good make up and vice versa. We've always done skincare, even though we are known as a colour make-up brand, but it is really about thinking about your routine and the health of your skin before you think about what you put on it. That's why we played very well in the primer world, because in a way, it is like skincare routine.

Dhara Vora Sabhnani is a Mumbai-based writer.

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