Vandana Luthra’s contributions to the industry and the reciprocal rewards are countless, as is conspicuous from the recognition and accolades that she has received – the Asian Business Leaders Forum Trailblazer Award, The Enterprise Asia Women Entrepreneur of the Year Award, featuring in the Forbes 50 Power Businesswomen in the APAC Region as also the Fortune magazine’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business in India, among others.
However, those who know her from close proximity are aware that her amazing success is a result of vision, focus, commitment and sheer hard work. A Delhite by birth, she had inherent smartness and a zeal to do something extraordinary – perfect ingredients to be immensely successful.
Born to a mechanical engineer father and to a mother who was closely involved with a charitable yoga ashram with an Ayurveda doctor, she first decided to graduate from the Polytechnic for Women in New Delhi, and then to gain expertise in beauty, fitness, food and nutrition and skin care from Germany, UK and France. While most women feel that professional life after marriage or after the birth of a child is over, Vandana Luthra decided to begin her professional life after nine years of her marriage to Mukesh Luthra and after three years of her second daughter’s birth. Thus, was laid the foundation of VLCC in 1989 as a beauty and slimming services centre in Safdarjung Development Area, New Delhi.
Success Unbound
With a strong presence in 330 locations in over 150 cities across 14 countries in South Asia, South East Asia, the GCC Region and East Africa, under Vandana Luthra’s expert guidance, VLCC has been offering weight management and beauty programmes (skin, body and hair care treatments and advanced dermatology and cosmetology solutions). VLCC’s weight-management solutions include a unique DNA-based weight management system to customize weight loss programmes for an individual. VLCC has the largest scale and breadth of operations within the beauty and wellness services industry in India.
With an employee strength of over 4,500, including nutrition counsellors, medical professionals, physiotherapists, cosmetologists and beauty professionals, Vandana Luthra has created a giant in the Indian beauty & wellness industry by market share in the total organized
industry.
As Vandana Luthra wanted to create fresh avenues to her rapidly expanding business, VLCC expanded into other segments of the beauty & wellness domain. Today, VLCC also manufactures in three company-owned, GMP-certified manufacturing plants – two in India and one in Singapore – over 300 skin care, body care and hair care products as well as nutraceuticals and a range of functional and fortified foods which are retailed in over 150,000 stores in the countries across Asia and Africa.
In her endeavor to raise the bar of service delivery standards for the beauty and wellness services industry in India at large, Vandana Luthra set up the VLCC Institute for Beauty & Nutrition in 2001, to develop a pool of formally trained manpower for the industry. Today, with 80 campuses across 53 cities, the VLCC Institute trains over 20,000 students annually and in an integral part of the country’s Skill India Mission.
Recognizing and giving due regard to her expertise in her field of business, she has been appointed as the Chairperson of the industry-led and government-backed Beauty & Wellness Sector Skill Council t. She is also a member of both the Steering Committee and the Sub-Committee of the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana as well as General Body Member of the New Delhi-based Morarji Desai National Institute of Yoga.
Infinite Belief in Herself
As Vandana Luthra shares herself, “When I started, there were hardly any women entrepreneurs. It was a male-dominated environment. I had to face a lot of skepticism about my ability to grow my business. The only thing I believed in was that my concept was unique, unusual and it was being introduced in India for the first time,” it was never easy to make this big.
As we all know now, the first step Vandana Luthra took was small, but today she is in a position to make confident strides in any direction and she is bound to succeed. She acknowledges that her husband has been very supportive throughout and had even offered to fund her dream, which she declined as she wanted to do it herself. “I booked the place and took a small loan and got started,” she says.
Her success came big and hard as her concept proved to be unique, and people and clients readily accepted it. It was embraced by the celebrities in an equally heartily manner. With every success, her self-belief increased and as she broke even in the very first month, she put in harder work and in the next few months she started getting return on investment too.
“My approach was scientific and I started working with doctors from day one. This worked in our favour too,” she explains. The other thing she feels worked in her favour was the branding of VLCC. “From day one I was clear that the brand would not be a glamorous one. The centre was a therapeutic facility and was projected in that very manner,” she adds. The brand still maintains the ethos it started with.
Inspired by and learning from her mother, Vandana Luthra set out to impact others’ lives by making things better for them through her holistic approach. Having learnt from her families before and after marriage, she gives a personal touch to everything she does right from remembering the name of every employee to walking in unannounced at VLCC centers across India to having candid chats with her employees to interacting with her clients to get direct and transparent feedback.
Keeping up with technology and the latest research, Vandana Luthra has established her own R&D centers, likes to travel extensively to all parts of the world to seminars and conferences, and always offers her clients the latest in health and beauty technology.
Back to the Society
Vandana Luthra is active in her contribution to the society, and in addition to helping the underprivileged & the physically challenged by providing them scholarships for free education, she has been working on projects like telemedicine centres, a remedial school with midday meal facility catering to 3,000 children, and a vocational training facility through the NGO, Khushii. She is also the patron of the Amar Jyoti Charitable Trust, which has over 800 children in its 2 schools, and which pioneered the concept of educating children with and without disability in equal number from nursery to class VIII.
