MUMBAI, INDIA — Kaya, India’s leading skincare & largest dermatologist network-enabled brand, recently unveiled a new identity, symbolic of a strategic realignment with its ever-growing young consumer base. Punctuated by this new purpose-fuelled mantra – “Beautiful is You” – the brand has now taken the first step towards extending support to the transgender community with the launch of a new initiative.
As a brand that has always advocated for inclusive beauty, Kaya is pushing the narrative forward to urge society to see beauty beyond gender and cultural norms. For the transgender community, whose very identity and existence has been invisibilised, beauty has been an improbable dream. For this International Transgender Day of Visibility, the brand has launched a new initiative that reiterates how beauty is intrinsic and visibility is more than representation. Kaya is setting a strong precedent for public service announcements and cause marketing campaigns by impacting measurable change that goes beyond performative representation. Even before the campaign was conceptualised by Schbang for Good, Kaya, in collaboration with PeriFerry, began training transgender women to upskill them with salon skills and hire them at key Kaya clinics in the country. Alongside this, the brand is also equipping 20,000 transgender people facing medical exclusion, with sanitizers.
Systemic social exclusion has repeatedly rendered the transgender community with a lack of opportunities, forcing a majority of them to take up unorganised work and livelihoods that threaten their safety. As a brand that stands for health, beauty, and safety, Kaya hopes to inspire other brands and enablers in the country to actively initiate conversations and policies that safeguard the transgender community’s lives and livelihoods.
Rajiv Nair, CEO, Kaya and Nivedita Nanda, CHRO, Kaya said, “With the new purpose fuelled inclusive beauty rebrand – Beautiful is You, Kaya proudly hosts a diverse client base, including transgender clients. With this campaign, we are taking a step further in realising our promise to reposition ourselves as an inclusive beauty brand, by opening up work opportunities for the transgender community. From hiring transgender women in collaboration with PeriFerry, to creating a safe and welcoming workspace through sensitisation workshops and trainings for internal employees, we are announcing a commitment to keep hiring more transgender individuals across our clinics Pan India.”
Samyukta Ganesh Iyer, VP and Head of Marketing, Kaya said, “#BeautyInSafety is a first-of-its-kind campaign that is informed by the real lives of the trans community and doesn’t hold back from capturing their true emotions, even the difficult ones, the ones that are harder to talk about. Because at Kaya, we stay true to our values of #BeautifulIsYou. Aside from our collaboration with PeriFerry, it was the natural next step for us to extend our efforts and make the 20,000 sanitisers we distribute to NGOs working with transgender people across the country, a touchpoint for them to access the best-in-class virtual training from our experts from the safety of their homes, so that they can upskill themselves, leading to better job opportunities. But for us at Kaya, this campaign is only a stepping stone towards the many initiatives we aim to create for the trans community going forward.”
Gazal Dhaliwal, trans woman and Bollywood screenwriter, and also the voice behind Kaya’s #BeautyInSafety campaign film, shared, “It’s good to see that Kaya has taken the initiative of hiring transgender people and opening up an opportunity for us to use our voice to tell our story. It was wonderful to work with the Schbang for Good team, who brought in a lens of learning, sensitivity, and sincerity to the narrative. Kaya, as an established brand with a presence amongst a predominantly cisgender audience, has taken its first step towards taking a firm and active stand to foster a culture of true inclusion. We hope other brands and individuals will draw inspiration from this and take up similar initiatives. Because there is a lot of potential and talent in the transgender community that is unexplored today, and all we need is an opportunity like this.”
Rhea Amin, AVP-Integrated Solutions, Schbang said, “We wanted to create a campaign that would go beyond performative representation of India’s transgender community in media and communications. We wanted to truly pass the mic to this community, set an example for how campaigns should create the space for marginalized identities to drive their narrative with their voice, and create real impact. From working with Gazal, who is not a trained VO artist, but so kindly agreed to lend their voice to the film, to spending time with the people featured in the film and understanding their lives closely, before shooting and showcasing moments that are really a part of their day to day lives. The team consistently consulted people from the trans community and incorporated each of their suggestions and lived insights into the aspects of this campaign, making this an incomparable learning and growth experience for all of us as well, and one that will always remain close to our hearts.”
The brand also engaged with strong, powerful voices from the community to amplify the stories of transgender people who have battled challenges to enter the workforce with courage by breaking stereotypes. Influencers like Dr. Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju and Nitasha Biswas came together to show their support to the brand for this initiative.
