On Wednesday, Falguni Nayar, Nykaa founder successfully became India’s seventh woman billionaire and the wealthiest self-made billionaire in the ongoing initial public offering (IPO) boom which noticed this amazing e-commerce beauty and fashion platform making an amazing debut on Dalal Street, also, its parent company FSN floating on the Mumbai stock exchange. Nykaa shares were listed at ₹2,018, along with an 80 percent premium, just some moments after the markets were opened on Wednesday. As per the reports of Bloomberg news agency, the market cap of the beauty and fashion e-commerce platform hit an overall valuation of 1 trillion rupees ($13.5 billion) within just the first five minutes of trade. And later, within an hour and a half, Nykaa’s market cap had already risen so high that it matched with industry giants such as Britannia, Godrej, and IndiGo.
Nykaa, which is India’s first unicorn startup led by a woman, was founded in 2012, by Falguni Nayar, a platform that sells beauty and personal care products through its mobile app and website. After eight years, the 58-year-old Falguni Nayar has finally joined along with six other Indian women billionaires, as she has got listed in the ranks as the wealthiest self-made billionaire. On Wednesday, at the listing ceremony, Falguni Nayar said, “I hope the Nykaa journey – an Indian-born, Indian-owned, and Indian-managed dream-come-true – can inspire each of you.”
In an interaction with NDTV, Nayar said, “In 2012 when I started beauty was a very big business in Asia, US, and Europe. In India beauty business was not taking off as it was hard to meet the needs of a large geographically and ethnically diverse country.”
Further, she said to the news agency, “For us, to be able to grow the business, we needed to educate the customer, that too digitally. That’s why Nykaa, in many ways, has created the beauty business in India.”
Ms. Nayar said to NDTV that the fascinating thing in the business was learning about the country beyond big cities like Mumbai and Delhi. She said, “We got a deep insight in the Indian consumer… from early days, we were looking at signs whether a consumer at Varanasi consumes different products from consumers in Delhi, to our surprise, even today when we look at the data of tier 2 and tier 3 consumption pattern is very similar to tier-1 cities.”
Falguni Nayar was herself an IPO banker earlier and she said that it has been amazing to see the company go through the IPO successfully. “I had been an IPO banker and taken a lot of companies to IPOs that gave me an excitement to start an entrepreneurial journey of my own. So today culminating in the IPO is a fantastic feeling that one has come so far and developed the maturity to be able to be a listed and traded player in the capital markets,” Falguni Nayar added.
Nykaa, which is the Sanskrit word for the actress, rapidly became so popular with young tech-savvy Indians, predominantly women, the women who wanted the wide selection of brands compared with what was provided or on offer at their local shops.“The best part about Nykaa is that it lets me access so many global brands that had never been sold in India before,” said 30-year-old loyal customer Sanaeya, according to the reports of the AFP news agency.
In addition to this, as Nykaa’s popularity grew, its brand appeal grew along with it, with top Bollywood actors such as Katrina Kaif, and other famous social media influencers and celebrities who helped the e-commerce platform to break new ground in beauty and personal care products carts of tech-savvy Indian women. Well, since 2015, Nykaa has also manufactured its in-house brand of products. Nykaa has recently started selling clothes and household products. It has to be noted that Nykaa has a growing high street presence with 80 stores across 40 Indian cities.
