WHEN HER FIRST BUSINESSES DIDN’T SCALE AS INTENDED, Vineeta Singh wondered if women were really cut out for entrepreneurship.
Today, the co-founder and CEO of Sugar Cosmetics is ruling her corner of the beauty business, having turned those early setbacks into a brand with a commanding presence across India.
A ‘Shark’ (judge and investor) on reality show Shark Tank India, Singh has talked about how changing the landscape for women entrepreneurs has been one of her biggest goals. She’s made a start by investing in ideas that she finds relatable, including a woman-led lifestyle and apparel brand from Mathura, but still feels there’s a lot more to be done. A firm believer in karma and patience, the triathlete and ultramarathoner plans to keep moving. One milestone at a time.
In this interview with Esquire India, Singh talks about tuning out the noise, proving doubters wrong, keeping promises to herself and fostering more women-led businesses.
Looking back, when was the first time you felt like you had earned authority in your field and what did it cost you to get there?
The beauty industry has always served women while men in boardrooms decided what beauty should look like. Sugar [Cosmetics] exists because, 11 years ago, women my age were tired of being told what beauty meant and wanted to be seen on our own terms instead. Any authority I have isn’t really mine; it belongs to that collective impatience, and I earn it every day rather than bank it. The cost was real: years of working hard while underpaid, with no safety net. But the joy of building something from scratch, with women who wanted to win as badly as I did, has always outpaced the cost.
Your career is not built on lineage or privilege. What did you have to build from scratch to claim your place?
A decade ago, I started building India’s first brand for women like me—with real skin in actual shades of brown, not beige. Everything started with the audacity to think a made-in-India brand could stand up to the big corporations, even though its founders had no business family backing, no rolodex and in most cases, no benefit of the doubt.
Talent gets attention; discipline sustains power. What does discipline look like in your daily life when no one is watching?
It looks like marathon training—unglamorous, repetitive, boring. If it’s on my calendar, whether it’s a customer call or a 5am run, I show up, good day or bad. I’ve learnt that keeping your word to yourself is the least talked-about superpower in business. It doesn’t look like anything from the outside. Compounded daily, it becomes almost everything.
Every trailblazer has a moment where the risk outweighed the safety. What was the decision that changed the scale of your life and how close were you to walking away?
At 23, I turned down a one-crore investment banking offer to start my own company. For the next 15 years, I quietly wondered if that had been the worst decision of my life—the financial struggle was relentless, and there were several points where going back to a real salary felt not just tempting but sensible. What kept me from turning back wasn’t confidence. It was that the unknown, even when it terrified me, was more interesting than the certainty I’d walked away from.
In the face of doubt or rejection, what belief kept you moving forward?
Hundreds of investors passed on Sugar, and there’s been no shortage of doubters since. But I believed—and still believe—that Indian women deserved better than being sold fairness creams and calling it beauty. That belief never needed investors to validate it. It just needed my team and me to outwork everyone who thought we wouldn’t. We’re still doing that.
Today, how do you decide when to push, when to pause and when to walk away?
People who watch me on Shark Tank assume I’m all numbers. The truth is closer to the opposite. The harder calls for me have always come down to gut instinct, and the real skill I’ve had to build over the years is tuning out everyone else’s opinion and judgment, long enough to actually hear my own.
How do you keep things real today?
I’m in a consumer business, which means reality is one customer complaint away at any given moment. I regularly read and answer them myself. Beyond that, I fail constantly. Products that bomb, campaigns that fizzle, hires that don’t work out. Nothing keeps your ego smaller than a weekly reminder that you’re wrong more often than you’d like to admit.
If regality is earned, not inherited, what responsibility comes with it? How do you want to be remembered?
Running a business in India is a privilege, and I think that comes with a debt attached—the responsibility to create opportunity for other women, not just talk about it. Sugar employs over 2,000 women; our warehouses alone have hundreds, many of them are the sole breadwinners for their families. I invest where I can in women-led businesses, but it’s not enough. Female founders are still underestimated and underfunded, in India and everywhere else. I don’t need to be remembered as a founder. I’d rather be remembered as someone who kept the door open long enough for a few thousand more women to walk through it.