How ₹8,000 Cr sexual wellness market is exploding in India?💰💰💰
The inflection point for sexual wellness products is here.
Welcome to the 145th edition of the GrowthX Newsletter. Every Tuesday & Thursday I write a piece on startups & business growth. Today’s piece is going to 95,300+ operators & leaders from startups like Google, Stripe, Swiggy, Razorpay, CRED & more
Sexual wellness is a 8 billion market worldwide. Interestingly, it’s over $1 billion as of 2021 in India. Being a taboo topic in India , $1 billion is absolutely the example of “users still buy what they would consider taboo publicly”.
Quick context 🗓
Sexual wellness is still a taboo (except few metro sub-cultures). But, that’s only in social settings. India’s sexual wellness category is growing at steady 6% year on year. It will be over $2 billion or ~ ₹ 17,000 Cr by 2030.
So what’s happening, really?
Maslow's hierarchy of needs at play 🕹
After 75 years of independence, the urban population behaviour is shifting from basic food, shelter, education, healthcare. The upper mid-class is looking for solving for "love & belongingness"
% Urban population growing 📈
Almost 12% in 1960 and getting to 36% in 2023, it has almost 3X in the last 60+ years hinting target market growth. This has added to the type of audience that has reached the maslow’s segment as discussed in point #1.
Source : Macrotrends.net website archives Privacy has been solved 🤫
With discreet packaging, online retailer have solved delivery under pseudo product names so even folks in the house won’t know the product until they open the package.
The packaging shows gibberish SKU numbers. Huge market niche 💨
Flipkart reported over ~₹1,000 Cr revenue from sexual wellness category. Mojo care is recording over ₹100 Cr revenue in span of 3 years of launch & more early stage companies popping up with MyMuse, Man Matters & Pee Safe.
Over 245K monthly searches for “sex toys” & related terms. The Jio effect📱
Most consumers are reachable through social media and search ads. Brands with paid ads don’t need to worry about the people against it raising concerns and creating a ruckus.
Women empowerment 🚺
As women gained more agency over their lives → they getting the right education about their sexual wellness & how that impacts their personal lives. This has opened up a completely new user base of people who buy wellness products which has typically been male dominated for decade in india.
How are brands capitalising?
Beautifully designed brand image 💰
From the websites to how the shipping happens to product’s touch & feel - it feels premium. At no point the brands try to do gimmicks with random false promises.
Pricing advantage 💰
With no need to interact with a human being during the buyer journey - online purchase feels secure. This advantage has given brands pricing power - online retailers are atleast 50% expensive than retail stores - yes 50% !
The CAC to LTV just works with the high margin pricing for most of these brands. No wonder, everyone’s going bazooka with paid ads as the payback is quick & the capital can be re-invested back into the business.
Frequency of purchase 🔁
The newly popped up brands understand frequency well. Electronic products aren’t very high frequency purchase and will be bought or gifted once in few years. That’s exactly why every brand has consumables.
This category will keep winning ⭐️
With more sex education in the country, more people would eventually move up in the Maslow's hierarchy creating newer market for these products, creating snowball effect on the category.
Insights like these are result of building the observation muscle 🙇🏻♂️
Especially when you are building an internet business for scale. The only way you can build this is going through enough experiences where you learn stuff & apply it in real world. We have 2000+ GrowthX members apply their observation muscle in a structured way every freaking day. It has helped them scale revenues for their companies across seed → public stage companies.
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