Nykaa, a specialised online beauty retailer, is set to become a unicorn in a couple of years on the back of its rapid expansion plans and the segment’s growth potential.
Taking time off from work is rare for Falguni Nayar, founder of Nykaa, India’s largest online beauty retailer. But when she fractured her hand this February, she didn’t have a choice. As it turned out, it was a real learning experience: She discovered that women aren’t the only ones who know about Nykaa; even the assistant of the orthopaedic surgeon who treated her at the Mumbai hospital was aware about Nykaa and its offerings. “I was so happy that he knew about Nykaa,” says Nayar, 55, the former managing director and chief executive of Kotak Investment Banking, who spent 19 years as an investment banker and broker.
Nayar always wanted to try her hand at entrepreneurship before she retired. As e-commerce was picking up at the time, the mother of twins quit Kotak at 50 and researched online models and realised that customers were looking for a larger array of products in personal care, bath, and beauty. Thus Nykaa—which gets its name from the Sanskrit word nayaka, or the one in the spotlight—was born in 2012.
It’s been barely six years since, but Nykaa has successfully created a spot for itself in India’s $6.5 billion cosmetics market. Other online retailers, such as Myntra and Amazon, also offer personal care and beauty products, but they’ve only intensified their focus on these products over the past year. Mumbai-based Nykaa, on the other hand, has become almost synonymous with the online beauty business. The valuation of the startup, according to industry insiders, is touching $500 million (around Rs 3,000 crore); and going by the way it is scaling up, and the growth potential of this segment, it seems well positioned to become India’s first beauty segment unicorn in a couple of years.
This story is from the June 15, 2018 edition of Fortune India.
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This story is from the June 15, 2018 edition of Fortune India.
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