How Ananth Narayanan Plans To Reshape BRND.ME

The brand aggregator's growth has cooled. A turnaround plan is in the works

- Priyamvada C

India Lifestyle Network, a digital content company, started in 2009. Over the next 15 years, it changed hands thrice. Founded by Angad Bhatia, the company was first sold to Times Internet in 2012. Ten years later, in 2022, Mensa Brand bought the company at a reported valuation of nearly $50 million. Mensa, recently rebranded as BRND.ME, operates as an aggregator of many consumer companies. India Lifestyle Network, the thinking was, could help its portfolio companies with digital brand-building.

However, in June this year, BRND.ME decided to sell the content company at a significant discount, for $9 million, to the RP Sanjiv Goenka (RPSG) Group.

As ownership changed hands for the third time, Bhatia left (he is now the CEO of Firstpost and Creator18), as did a few other employees.

Several people Mint spoke to said that BRND.ME didn't know how to make the content company work for its brands. However, Ananth Narayanan, the founder and CEO of the firm, clarified that his house of brands didn't need a media company any longer.

"We later realized that we could do the brand building anyway without having to own a media company. We found a better home for the company in the RPSG Group and even from a management standpoint, this helped us to better focus on our core areas of lifestyle, health, and wellness," Narayanan, who in his previous role was the CEO of fashion marketplace Myntra, clarified.

Since BRND.ME started as Mensa in May 2021, it has acquired 24 companies to date—from apparel and cosmetics companies to healthy snacking and garden stores. Based on the premise of scaling these brands, the parent company bagged a little over $200 million in funding from investors including Alpha Wave Global, Tiger Global, Accel and Norwest Venture Partners, making it one of the largest seed investments in India in 2021. It was also one of the fastest to achieve unicorn status—a billion dollars in valuation—within six months of operations.