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.
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.