Brands
Chtrbox launches Funbox, Influencer Gifting Service
Mumbai: Leading Indian influencer marketing company, Chtrbox announces the launch of Funbox, a creative and scalable influencer gifting solution, in time for the festive season. With the simple gesture of gifting, Funbox offers brands a smart solution to get their products in front of relevant influencers, build & strengthen meaningful relations, and most importantly get authentic reviews and earned media.
Commenting on the launch, Pranay Swarup, CoFounder and CEO, Chtrbox said, “Sharing of new products & personalized experiences with influencers is one of the most authentic and cost-effective ways to let your influencers know what’s awesome about your brand and product. Unboxings with influencers are often a missed opportunity, and we want to make it fun and easy for brand and influencers with Funbox.”
Unboxings are product reveals by influencers, and make for high impact quality videos that are most cost-effective and get above average engagement rates. “Our advantage at Chtrbox is that we’re able to analyze past unboxing performance of influencers to determine with whom and how a brand is most likely to see success. With the launch of our influencer gifting service Funbox, we aim to make marketers’ lives easier by getting the right product into the right influencer’s hands, at scale” adds Kajal Mehta, Head of Brand Partnerships at Chtrbox.
Funbox is a full suite influencer gifting and sampling solution covering strategy, data-driven influencer selection by Chtrbox’s proprietary influencer discovery platform, engaging content creation, and performance reporting. Funbox is also available for digital products who may not have considered unboxing before, with creative strategies on how to best showcase the brand and product.
Unboxing as a trend cannot be ignored, with exponential growth in usage in recent years. The best unboxings are done by category experts, who their followers look to for their knowledge and unbiased information. It’s a great, informal way to build a strong rapport with an audience to trust a product, assuming it is in fact a quality offering. Furthermore, Chtrbox recommends unboxings as great cost-effective approach for brands to validate whether popular social media influencers are true product advocates for them, prior to investing more heavily in them as formal brand influencers.
With the festive season around the corner, it's the right time of the year for brands to think about gifting & building meaningful relations with the right influencers. Interested to learn more about Funbox? Get in touch on hello@chtrbox.com
Brands
Estée Lauder to shed 10,000 jobs as new boss bets on digital shift
The cosmetics giant raises its profit outlook but stays silent on a possible merger with Spain’s Puig, as job cuts deepen and a three-year sales slump weighs on the turnaround
NEW YORK: Stéphane de La Faverie is not done cutting. Estée Lauder announced on Friday that it plans to eliminate as many as 3,000 additional jobs, taking its total redundancy programme to as many as 10,000 roles, up from a previous target of 7,000 announced a year ago. The company, which owns La Mer, The Ordinary, Tom Ford, and Aveda, employs roughly 57,000 people worldwide. The mathematics of what is now being contemplated is stark.
The fresh round of cuts is expected to generate a further $200 million in savings, bringing the total annual savings from the programme to as much as $1.2 billion before taxes. That money, De La Faverie has made clear, will be ploughed back into the turnaround.
A CEO in a hurry
De La Faverie, who took the helm in January 2025, inherited a company that had endured three consecutive years of annual sales declines. His response has been to move fast and cut deep. A significant portion of the latest redundancies reflects his push to reduce headcount at US department stores, long a cornerstone of Estée Lauder’s distribution model but now a channel in structural decline. In their place, he is accelerating the shift toward faster-growing online platforms, including Amazon.com and TikTok Shop, a pivot that is reshaping not just where Estée Lauder sells but how it thinks about its customers.
The numbers are moving in the right direction
Despite the pain, there are signs the medicine is working. Estée Lauder raised its profit outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year, guiding for adjusted earnings per share in the range of $2.35 to $2.45, above analyst estimates and a notable step up from the $2.05 to $2.25 range it had guided for in February. Organic net sales growth is expected to come in at 3 per cent, the company said, at the high end of the range it set out in February.
The share price tells a mixed story. After De La Faverie took charge, the stock surged nearly 60 per cent, buoyed by investor optimism that a longtime company insider could finally arrest the decline. But 2026 has been rougher: the shares have fallen 27 per cent this year, weighed down by disappointing February results and the overhang of unresolved merger talks with Spanish beauty giant Puig Brands SA. The company gave no additional details about those discussions on Friday, leaving the market to guess.
Silence on Puig
The proposed tie-up with Puig remains the most consequential unknown hanging over Estée Lauder. A deal with the Barcelona-based group, which owns brands including Carolina Herrera and Rabanne, would reshape the global luxury beauty landscape. But with nothing new to say and a turnaround still very much in progress, De La Faverie is asking investors to trust the process.
Three years of sales declines, 10,000 job cuts, and a merger that may or may not happen. At Estée Lauder, the overhaul has barely started.
