On November 4, 2026, FSN E-Commerce Ventures, the company behind Nykaa, reported its numbers for the July to September quarter. Revenue from operations came in at Rs 3,006 crore, up 28% from a year earlier. Net profit rose about 207% to Rs 101 crore. It is a good moment to look back at how Falguni Nayar built the company, and why she started so late.
The early years
Nayar grew up in a Gujarati family in Mumbai. She studied at IIM Ahmedabad and began her career in 1985 as a management consultant at A.F. Ferguson and Co. She then spent 19 years at the Kotak Mahindra Group. When she left in 2012, she was managing director of its institutional equities and investment banking business.
She walked away from that senior job a few months before turning 50, with no background in retail, beauty or technology, and put family money into the new venture.
The idea
Nayar has said that meeting founders as a banker pushed her towards starting something of her own. She had also lived abroad and noticed a gap. In London and New York, shoppers could browse wide beauty ranges in large stores. In India, most cosmetics were sold through small neighbourhood shops with limited choice.
She believed the category was underestimated. In a 2022 interview with The Week, she said “beauty consumption in India is at a very early stage.”
Nykaa’s website went live at the end of October 2012. Her only post on X (then Twitter), dated October 29, 2012, announced that the site would launch the next day.
The hard part
Starting a tech-led business without a tech background was not easy. Nayar later said in an interview that she wished she had a co-founder to help with the technology struggles in the early days. Several international beauty brands were also pulling out of India around that time.
Her banking years shaped how she handled money. Nykaa was run in a capital-efficient way and, according to Business Standard, raised only about $100 million in equity before going public. Nayar told The Week that “Nykaa was built with a lot of financial prudence.”
How it grew
Over the next decade, Nykaa grew from a single beauty website into a group with several parts. It added fashion, opened physical stores, built its own brands under House of Nykaa, and started Superstore, a business that supplies products to small retailers.
The company became profitable within its first decade. For the year ended March 2021, FSN E-Commerce Ventures reported revenue of about Rs 2,440 crore and a profit of about Rs 61 crore, as reported by The Week.
The biggest turning point came in November 2021. Nykaa’s Rs 5,352 crore IPO was subscribed about 82 times, and the stock listed on November 10 at roughly an 80% premium to the issue price. On listing day, Nayar became India’s richest self-made woman, with a net worth estimated at around $7 billion at the time. She and her family held about 56.56% of the company after listing.
The years after the IPO were harder, with the share price falling well below its early highs and fashion staying loss-making for a long time.
Where it stands now
In the September 2026 quarter, Nykaa’s gross merchandise value (GMV) rose 30% to Rs 6,151 crore, and EBITDA grew 65% to Rs 263 crore. The beauty business alone recorded GMV of Rs 4,454 crore, and its retail network reached 338 stores in 111 cities. Owned brands under House of Nykaa now have an annualised GMV run rate of more than Rs 4,000 crore.
Fashion has also turned a corner. Its net sales value grew 47% to Rs 509 crore, and its EBITDA margin moved from minus 3.5% a year earlier to a small positive 0.2%. Nykaa also agreed to buy an 82% stake in Simply Nam, a professional make-up brand, for up to Rs 33 crore, with the deal expected to close in the December quarter.
On the results, Nayar said the company “continued to improve operational efficiency, particularly across marketing and overheads.”
Lessons for founders
Age is not the barrier people think it is. Nayar started close to 50. Her years in finance gave her judgment about capital and investors.
Spend carefully. Raising relatively little before the IPO meant Nykaa had to focus on unit economics early. Profit growing faster than revenue in the latest quarter shows that habit.
Know your gaps. Nayar has been open about wishing she had a tech co-founder.
Reporting based on Business Today, Kotak Neo, Business Standard and The Week.
Featured image: Vyacheslav Argenberg, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
