Home ›› 21 Aug 2022 ›› Business Connect
It all started with three young professionals working abroad and a dream to do something unique at home.
The trio had well-paid jobs when they decided to leave the shot at a better life in another country behind and start taking the steps to achieve their dream of launching the business they wanted in Bangladesh.
And after years of hard work, the dream that took shape back in 2013 is now dominating the country’s beauty industry, by being an omnichannel multi-branded retail business with both online and offline presence.
We are talking about the country’s first beauty and self-care omnichannel startup, Shajgoj, which has brought cosmetics products of many international brands to the consumers here.
With its consumer-friendly and timely services, Shajgoj has become very popular among people around the country and is currently the country’s top and largest beauty and personal care e-commerce platform.
After starting as a content-based blog website in 2013, Shajgoj is now the world’s largest Bangla language portal with 10,000 articles and 2,000 videos on beauty, cosmetics, personal care and lifestyle.
The startup currently has 450 employees directly giving services to its 5 lakh customers.
The company has already secured $4 million in investments and is exponentially growing its business with 4,000-5,000 orders per day.
Earlier this year, Shajgoj secured Tk 21 crore during the seed fund round at Surge, a rapid scale-up programme of venture capital firm Sequoia Capital India. It also received funding from SBK Tech Venture.
The idea
The idea of working in Bangladesh’s beauty industry first took shape in the mind of Nazmul Sheikh, one of the three founders of Shajgoj, in 2013 right after he quit his job as a telecom engineer at a company in Nigeria.
“I worked in Grameenphone after completing my graduation at BUET in 2008 and worked for around three years. Then I went to Nigeria to work as a telecom consultant. After a while, I came to realise that the telecom industry is going to be saturated soon,” said Nazmul.
Then, Nazmul had two lucrative options before him — leading the life of a telecom expert in Nigeria or settling down in Australia with a similar job.
He wanted to do something in Bangladesh. But he never thought, even in his wildest dreams, that he would one day sell beauty products and become a leading beauty product marketer in the country’s industry.
At the time, Nazmul’s wife Sinthia Sharmin Islam, who later became the co-founder and chief commercial officer of Shajgoj, had been working at a community pharmacy and beauty supply store in Nigeria.
The trained pharmacist had to frequently check out the details of medicines and beauty products online and frustratingly found nothing regarding them in Bangla. She felt the need of doing something about it but did not know how to share it with Nazmul.
The couple’s wish to do something in Bangladesh’s beauty industry started taking shape almost by chance during a stopover in Dubai on their way to Bangladesh.
Nazmul and Sinthia spent some time at a beauty store where people could make the right decision while buying products based on experts’ suggestions. They never saw anything like that in Bangladesh.
It was sort of the “light-bulb moment” for the couple. They started looking into it the idea and found out that the market in Bangladesh was full of opportunities as it was emerging and undersized at that time.
Nazmul shared the business idea with Milky Mahmud, a former colleague of Nazmul from their days in Grameenphone, who was working at another telecom company in Nigeria at the time.
After Milky — who is now the chief operating officer at Shajgoj — decided to join their venture back at home, the trio started working in full swing and thus began the journey of Shajgoj.
Laying the bricks
While researching the country’s beauty industry, they found no major player in the field of skincare, hair care and makeup. They also found that the consumers were mostly worried about finding authentic beauty care products in wholesale and retail shops and even in super shops.
At the very beginning of the startup, the entrepreneurs conducted a pilot project to learn more about consumer behaviour and interest and soon started gaining in-depth knowledge from various sources — both local and international. That helped them become experts in this field very soon.
The trio decided to remove the consumers’ confusion regarding product authenticity and usage by starting the “shajgoj.com” website in Bangla — to make it friendlier to the local audience — and creating content on beauty products and personal care.
At the time, the beauty product market in Bangladesh was witnessing gradual growth as the middle-income and affluent population was continuously growing due to the country’s economic development.
However, back then, consumers were confused about which products they needed and from whom they should buy as beauty awareness was not remarkably present.
On top of that, the e-commerce part was not what it is today. The mobile financial services apps were not available and logistics players were inadequate. There was also no option for home delivery outside Dhaka.
“We knew it won’t be wise to launch a company and try to sell products out of the blue because people do not know us and they won’t trust us. So, we decided to build a market first by providing beauty solutions and gaining trust. We started sharing videos and articles of beauty tips and tricks after launching the website in 2013,” said Nazmul, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Shajgoj.
“Gradually, we started getting great audience responses after we shared our content on Facebook. Many from the audience, including general people and experts, also showed their interest to write about skincare.
“Our contents were at the core of our brand. They drew more and more people as our contents, apart from traditional tips and tricks, were about advanced beauty-related stuff like Tymar and Serum, which most people did not know about properly,” he said.
He continued, “The audience response inspired us more and assured us that we can create a good business platform based on this. We were being viewed as beauty experts because our contents actually helped the people and created a connection.”
“We opened our first physical store at Jamuna Future Park in 2015. We saw our readers remarkably coming to the store to buy the authentic and correct products they need. It was easy for us to sell in a market that was very scattered at the time,” he added.
The second outlet opened at Simanto Sombhar in 2016.
Difference with others
While most companies are just selling products, Shajgoj has taken itself to another level by being intrinsically different.
Along with selling the products, Shajgoj offers its customers the best recommendations from experts for their skincare — which made a huge impact on the consumers.
Any customer can reach out to Shajgoj easily online or over the phone to get expert solutions for any beauty-related problems.
Also, at the offline in-person stores, Shajgoj’s trained personnel suggest to customers the beauty products that are best for their skin.
These services have helped the company gain the trust of the consumers easily and very quickly. As a result, 70 per cent of Shajgoj’s current customers are repeat customers.
Covering the country
In the beginning, Shajgoj was selling most of the products to the people in Dhaka city. But that scenario has changed over the years.
Earlier, 20 per cent of the deliveries were made outside the capital city. Nowadays, after its name and fame spread thanks to social media, 55 per cent of the deliveries go outside Dhaka.
The company is covering most of the country using different delivery platforms.
Currently, half a million customers are receiving the company’s service and Shajgoj is seeing 4-5 per cent business growth year on year.
Shajgoj recorded significant growth after launching its e-commerce site — shop.shajgoj.com — in October 2018 and its mobile app in April 2019.
The beauty e-commerce startup could barely manage to find around 20 orders every day when it started operating.
At present, it daily sells 4,000-5,000 curated authentic cosmetics and makeup products from over 450 renowned local and international brands at its four flagship stores in Dhaka and online with a flat delivery charge all over the country.
Marketing strategy
At a time when many companies are offering big discounts to boost sales, Shajgoj is not following suit. Instead of discounts, the company believes only trust can boost sales.
The company’s main marketing channel is Facebook, one of the dominant social media platforms in Bangladesh, which it uses to communicate with customers and provide them with their required services.
As women are their main customers, Nazmul said, the majority of their experts and consultants at the shops and online are women. “We want to help them become empowered and more confident.”
“We can retain the customers and attract new ones because of the friendly and cordial behaviour of our service providers,” he added.
“Consumer-friendly content creating, curated physical shops and e-commerce store — I don’t think anyone else is doing all three things at the same time like Shajgoj.
“Our content and customer-friendly approach have made us different and unique from others. We now have the largest collection of contents and experts on beauty care,” said Nazmul.
Source of products
Of all the products Shajgoj sells, 40 per cent are skin-oriented and 35 per cent are makeup-oriented.
At present, the company is meeting 60 per cent of demand by importing products and the rest 40 per cent from the local manufacturers.
Shajgoj itself has also started manufacturing some products. It currently sells different types of skincare products in the market under seven brands it owns. The brands are Dermalogika, Hawaa, Lilac, Nirvana Color, Panam Care, Rajkonna, and Skincafe.
The local products have a significant demand as they are cheaper but great in quality, said Nazmul.
“We follow several good companies to establish a good culture. Providing good services via talented and skilled people is part of that,” he added.
Challenges
Talking to The Business Post, Nazmul said that creating content on beauty, skincare and/or lifestyle issues was always a big challenge because they had to be factually true and made from the right source to be effective as per the audience’s demand.
“When we started our first outlet, we didn’t have much experience in retailing. We also didn’t know much about government rules and regulations, such as VAT and taxes, etc. The supply chain has also been a persistent challenge,” he said.
“Securing investment has always been very difficult. Also, the bigger your startup becomes, the more new challenges you will face,” he added.
“A consistent policy is needed. There’s a 5 per cent VAT on beauty products when they are sold in super shops but there’s no VAT when they are sold in retail shops. This difference is not good for revenue collection,” Nazmul said.
Also, he claimed that the import duty on beauty products is 110-150 per cent. “Recently, the rate went up to 180 per cent. If the rate remains this high, people won’t import products through legal channels and the government will fail to collect revenue properly.”
Future dream
Nazmul said they currently have half a million customers and hope to have 5 million customers within 10 years.
“This is a $3 billion market and e-commerce holds only 1 per cent of that. We hope the 1 per cent will turn into 30 per cent by 2030 and the market’s worth will grow to $7 billion,” he said.
“Unilever is the largest player in the market right now. But we are in the premium category now too,” he added.
“Even though we sell 5 per cent products physically and the rest 95 per cent online, in-person offline stores help us gain the customer’s trust easily because people like to touch and check out the product before buying them,” Nazmul stressed.
With the consumers’ demand growing gradually, the Shajgoj CEO said they plan to cover the divisional cities in three years and all 64 districts soon after.
