Six years ago, GroomYourGram was not an agency. It was one person, a laptop, and a conviction that influencer marketing in India was about to become far bigger than the brands around it realized. Today, that single desk has grown into a 35-person company — one that has run campaigns across dozens of brands, built out its own experiential events arm, and now operates as one of Mumbai’s more strategically minded influencer marketing agencies. The distance between those two points is the real story.
The agency’s earliest days were quiet ones. GroomYourGram began as a freelance operation, working with brands one relationship at a time, learning the mechanics of creator marketing directly from the platforms creators were building on. What the founder understood early was that this space was not going to stay small or informal for long — and that the agencies who would matter in five years would be the ones who took it seriously before anyone else did.
That seriousness didn’t arrive fully formed. GroomYourGram’s early years leaned heavily on execution — getting creators briefed, content delivered, campaigns closed. The shift toward a genuinely strategic, ideas-first approach is a more recent chapter, built through years of running campaigns, watching what actually moved the needle for a brand versus what simply looked good in a deck, and rebuilding the offering around that difference. That evolution now shows up in how the agency thinks about a brief before it thinks about a creator list — reach, cost efficiency, and brand-fit worked out at the strategy stage, not patched on afterward. Brands that worked with GroomYourGram in its earlier years and remember an execution-first agency would find a very different agency today.
Behind that shift is founder Palak Tanna, who built GroomYourGram’s operating backbone almost entirely through trial and error — figuring out what worked by running it, watching it fail or succeed, and rebuilding from there, even as she was still finding her own footing along the way. That kind of building, without a playbook to follow, is rarely visible from the outside. It shows up instead in the systems, the standards, and the instincts that a six-year-old agency now runs on almost without thinking.
The other part of that story is the team around her. GroomYourGram’s 35 people are, for the most part, young — many still early in their careers — and what holds them together is not a job description but a shared sense of where the agency is headed. It is a team that talks about the vision more often than it talks about the company, and that difference tends to show up in the work: in how much ownership a campaign executive takes on a brief that isn’t technically theirs, in how often someone stays on a problem past the point where “good enough” would have been acceptable.
Six years, one employee to thirty-five, a freelance operation to a strategic agency brands now trust with their biggest campaigns — the arc is, on its own, a good story. But the point GroomYourGram would rather leave you with is simpler: influencers, if planned well, can generate more than just views.
About GroomYourGram
GroomYourGram is a Mumbai-based influencer marketing agency known for building integrated, ideas-led campaigns for skincare and lifestyle brands across India.