MAM
SUGAR Cosmetics onboards Suchit Sikaria as chief business officer
Mumbai: Beauty brand SUGAR Cosmetics has announced the appointment of Suchit Sikaria, former managing partner of Performics India, as the chief business officer to lead and handle the core direct to consumer division. With this strategic move, the brand aims to double-down on its aggressive past performance of building one of India’s fastest-growing brands in the D2C consumer space, it said in a statement.
An MBA from IIM – Ahmedabad, Sikaria brings more than 14 years of leadership experience in sales, marketing, and business operations with stints at Performics India and Nokia India. He also brings an additional four years of start-up experience from his own entrepreneurial venture.
SUGAR Cosmetics co-founder & CEO Vineeta Singh said, “We are excited to welcome Suchit Sikaria as the new Chief Business Officer for our D2C business at SUGAR Cosmetics and are eager to see the magic he creates for the brand. Over the past 6 months at SUGAR, we have aggressively been growing the team and recruiting the sharpest minds who can accelerate the brand’s trajectory – 120+ new team members, and we’re not done yet. Suchit’s deep expertise in scaling large-budget performance marketing campaigns for one of India’s largest digital advertising agencies will be pivotal to scaling the revenues 5x times in the next 3 years and further cementing the brand’s hold in the D2C market space.”
Speaking on his new role, Sikaria said, “I am incredibly excited to start this new journey at SUGAR Cosmetics. I have been avidly following the journey of this brand and have been quite inspired by how quickly they have grown and become a cult-favourite among India’s gen Z and millennial women. I look forward to bringing in my experience of the industry and building the brand into a much larger D2C player; not just in the country, but even globally. I look forward to this new opportunity!”
In addition to SUGAR’s international presence in the US & Russia markets, SUGAR has also recently forayed into the Middle Eastern market in an exclusive partnership with the Landmark group and will be retailing their products at Lifestyle Stores across UAE and other countries
AD Agencies
Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
