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February 2, 2026
Sakshi Sadashiv, MINT
Bengaluru, 02 Feb 2026
BRND.ME, a roll-up commerce company, expects to complete its reverse flip (change of headquarters) from Singapore to India by March, clearing a key regulatory hurdle as it prepares to tap Indian public markets with an IPO.
Despite the rise of private labels from quick-commerce giants such as Swiggy Instamart and Zepto, CEO Ananth Narayanan remains confident. He argues that BRND.ME’s core categories—spanning complex, value-added products such as specialized haircare and niche party supplies—possess a level of brand loyalty and complexity that is difficult for generic retail labels to replicate. While private labels are currently displacing national brands in high-frequency, simple categories like dairy and staples, Narayanan believes the company’s core categories remain protected from this encroachment as they drive searches.
Having shifted its strategy from aggressive acquisitions to organic scaling, the company is now doubling down on its four largest brands: MyFitness (peanut butter), Botanic Hearth (haircare), Majestic Pure (aromatherapy), and PartyPropz (celebration supplies).
About 10-15% of BRND.ME’s India business currently comes from quick commerce, a channel the company plans to scale, Narayanan said. The company is the leader in party supplies on quick-commerce platforms, benefiting from impulse-driven demand. “People forget birthdays and anniversaries, so it’s a classic category to build a brand on quick commerce,” he said. The category contributes about ₹200 crore of revenue. The company also leads the peanut butter category through MyFitness, with a 30% market share on all quick commerce platforms and annual revenue of ₹270 crore.
The company’s revenue run rate stands at about $200 million. Male consumers worried about male-pattern baldness now account for about 35% of haircare sales. The company aims for a 10-fold jump in aromatherapy and haircare sales from $6 million to $60 million within four years, led by Majestic Pure and Botanic Hearth.
Drawing on his experience running Myntra, Narayanan said that private labels typically have a ceiling. “Even when we pushed hard on private labels at Myntra, they never went beyond 25-30% of the overall portfolio. That tends to remain the case as the categories we operate in are very hard to displace because we drive searches.”
This dynamic is already visible across several quick-commerce categories. The peanut butter segment is heavily consolidated on Blinkit, with Pintola and MyFitness together accounting for about 73% of sales, according to data from Datum Intelligence. Similar patterns have emerged in other categories. Blinkit’s popcorn segment, for instance, has rapidly consolidated into a duopoly, with 4700BC and Act II controlling 99% of sales.
Private labels muscling in
While Blinkit has consciously avoided launching private-label products on its platform, Swiggy has done so through Noice, and Zepto through Relish and Daily Good. For established brands, these private labels are becoming harder to ignore. Swiggy has scaled Noice aggressively, expanding the portfolio from about 200 to 350 stock keeping units (SKUs) and onboarding more manufacturing partners while moving beyond staples into categories such as beverages and ready-to-cook foods. These products are aimed at delivering significantly higher margins of 35-40%, compared with 10-15% on third-party brands, Mint reported earlier.
Private labels now contribute an estimated 6-8% of quick-commerce sales, up from 1-2% two years ago, according to data from 1digitalstack.ai, though penetration in perishables remains limited because of supply-chain complexity and quality concerns. A broader push into fresh categories could lift private-label share to 10-15%. Noice has already captured 3.4% of wafer sales and 1.9% of biscuit sales on the platform within months of its launch, according to 1digitalstack.ai data. The two categories are dominated by Lay’s and Britannia, which have a market share of about 35% each in their respective segments.
Zepto’s private-label push spans multiple everyday categories, including Relish for meat products, Daily Good for staples, Chyll for ice cubes and juices, and Aaha! for snacks, sweets, cereals and batters.
This growing presence creates a structural ‘trap’ for digital-first brands. Devangshu Dutta, chief executive at Third Eyesight, a consultancy firm, said, “Brands that are overly dependent on a single sales platform remain structurally vulnerable to being replaced by the platform’s own private labels, which are designed to capitalise on product opportunities that already have proven demand.” Platforms, he explained, tend to dominate high-frequency purchases, often undercutting brands on both price and visibility.
Persistently high online customer acquisition costs add to the pressure, particularly if the customer relationship is owned by the platform rather than the brand. “This has been one of the significant friction points for all digital-only brands, and weighs especially heavily on companies that have online-heavy portfolios with multiple brands in play,” Dutta added.
(Published in Mint)
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January 7, 2026
Writankar Mukherjee & Shabori Das, Economic Times / Brand Equity
7 January 2026
There’s a renewed sparkle in the adage ‘Old is Gold’ at India’s biggest conglomerate Reliance. Banking on Indians’ nostalgia, it is hawking and reviving labels that once defined everyday life, Campa and BPL among them, to set its consumer venture’s cash registers ringing.
What started with sales of Rs. 3,000 crore in FY24, Reliance Industries’ fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) business quickly accelerated towards Rs. 11,500 crore the following year. With a staggering Rs. 5,400 crore posted in the July to September FY26 quarter alone, the revival story is clearly striking a chord with consumers. But Campa, already the largest contributor to the Reliance Industries’ FMCG business, is only the beginning.
The company is injecting fresh life into acquisition of legacy brands such as Ravalgaon in confectionery and Velvette in personal care. Reliance is applying the same formula to the consumer electronics business, covering televisions, refrigerators and washing machines. Once a staple of Indian households, Kelvinator and BPL are being reintroduced.
Strategy Rings a Bell?
Driving this revival is a strategy Reliance knows well: aggressive pricing that is often 20 to 30% lower than competitors, offering generous trade margins to woo retailers, and a rapid expansion of distribution from its own stores to kiranas and local outlets, alongside local sourcing and an expanding product portfolio.
It’s a playbook that once created waves in the telecom market; this time, however, it comes with a generous dose of nostalgia.
The path ahead though may not be easy. While Campa may have yielded results in a category linked to instant gratification, electronics is a high-ticket, long-term purchase. Marketers are debating whether consumers in their 20s and 30s—spoilt for choice by global brands—would choose a Kelvinator refrigerator, a BPL TV or a Velvette shower gel over LG, Samsung, Dove or Fiama.
Deep Pockets and Retail Muscle
Reliance, experts say, has two advantages— its balance sheet and strong market presence with its own retail stores. “Reliance has the intent to dominate a market in whatever business it enters. Their brands in FMCG and electronics too have a more-than-decent chance of surviving and thriving,” says Devangshu Dutta, founder and chief executive of Third Eyesight, a consultancy in consumer space.
“As long as they have capital and management capability, they may cut their teeth,” he says.
The company is approaching the FMCG and electronics businesses in startup mode, but with deep pockets. As a Reliance executive explains, the strategy is to invest and invest more, gain market share, continue to absorb losses and after achieving scale, drive efficiencies to generate profit.
The path has been carved out. Reliance Consumer Products (RCPL), the FMCG business entity and what started as a unit of Reliance Retail Ventures, is now a direct subsidiary of Reliance Industries. This shift will help the company raise funds independently and eventually launch an initial public offering (IPO), and drive valuation independent of retail. The electronic business may follow suit as it grows in scale.
Reliance did not respond to Brand Equity’s queries.
Electronics: A Tough Play
Industry executives say the electronics foray will not be an easy battle against international brands. Global brands enjoy strong appeal in the Indian market, and companies such as LG, Samsung and Sony have been present for over two decades, cementing their position. Even the newer ones like Haier and Voltas Beko are rapidly gaining market share.
Pulkit Baid, director of the electronics retail chain Great Eastern Retail, says that unlike the cola industry, where two large players (Coca-Cola and PepsiCo) dominate, consumer durables are highly fragmented. “Kelvinator enjoys the brand heritage of an Ambassador car. But we will have to see if the brand is welcomed by Gen Z with the same euphoria as Campa.”
Industry veteran Deba Ghoshal notes that very few legacy brands have been able to withstand the onslaught of new-age brands in consumer electronics. Voltas (from the Tatas) and Godrej are exceptions, he adds.
“Reliance Retail has the strategic foresight to re-establish legacy brands in consumer durables space, instead of chasing a standalone private label business,” adds Ghoshal. “There is a strong opportunity in BPL and Kelvinator, provided they are re-launched with strong value and engaging emotive hooks, and not restricted to being a price warrior. Reliance has the capability; it just needs the right strategy.”
Reliance is readying campaigns for BPL and Kelvinator to connect with the younger consumers. The company is planning to re-launch them beyond Reliance Retail stores—targeting regional retail chains and e-commerce platforms and expanding quickly into smaller towns. With India’s electronics penetration still low—15 to 18% for flat-panel TVs, 40% for refrigerators, 20% for washing machines and less than 10% for air conditioners (ACs)—Reliance has substantial headroom for growth.
Angshuman Bhattacharya, partner and national leader for consumer products and retail at EY India, says Reliance may focus on tier two and three cities. “These markets have been a low priority for the Samsungs and LGs because they want to play in the premium segment where margins are higher. That is where Reliance may expand the market. It requires a lot of capital in terms of inventories and distribution, and Reliance has the ability and potential to do so.”
FMCG: Ball is Rolling
The FMCG push is gaining strong momentum. Reliance plans to double its distribution to three million outlets this fiscal.
Over the next three years, it looks to invest Rs. 40,000 crore to create Asia’s largest integrated food parks and has already invested Rs. 3,000 crore in manufacturing.
Isha Ambani, who spearheads Reliance’s retail and FMCG businesses, drew attention to Campa’s comeback at the company’s AGM in August: “Campa-Cola now holds double-digit market share across many states, breaking a 30-year MNC duopoly of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Campa Energy gained two million social media followers in just 90 days.”
Her target is bold: To reach Rs. 1 lakh crore in FMCG revenue within five years and become India’s largest FMCG company with a global presence.
Market watchers say such high ambitions require high investments. Kannan Sitaram, co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Fireside Ventures, said a company like Hindustan Unilever would set aside at least `30-40 crore to launch a brand. “Advertising and marketing alone would take up more than half of that. And when you are re-launching a brand which has not been around for a long while, the spending tends to be 25 to 30% higher in the initial three to four months,” he says.
Yet, analysts believe Reliance is in the consumer brands business for the long term. Bhattacharya says whatever Reliance has learned in this short time is meaningful and serious, something nobody else has managed.
Mover and Shaker
Competitors, including Tata Consumer Products, Dabur and PepsiCo’s largest bottler in India Varun Beverages, have acknowledged the turbulence created by Reliance in the FMCG sector. But the industry hopes low penetration levels will ensure there is room for everyone.
Varun Beverages chairman Ravi Jaipuria did not mince his words in the company’s latest earnings call in October-end: “They (Reliance) have woken all of us up and we are becoming more attentive… it is a very healthy sign for the country because our per capita consumption is so low that in the next five to 10 years, this market may double or triple…there is a huge room, and we see only positives in this.”
The revival of legacy brands and aggressive push into FMCG and consumer electronics indicates that Reliance is preparing for the long haul. In this fight driven by nostalgia, competitive pricing, deep pockets and distribution muscle, the battle for shelf space has just begun.
(Published in Economic Times/Brand Equity)
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October 24, 2025
Entrepreneur India
Oct 23, 2025
Indian consumers are increasingly opting for private labels and in-house brands over established ones, and retailers are taking note. According to EY’s ‘Future Consumer Index 2025’, more than half of India’s consumers are now choosing in-house brands over legacy labels.
The report highlights that 52 per cent of Indian consumers have switched to private labels for better value, while 70 per cent believe these in-house brands offer comparable or superior quality. Backed by this shift, retailers from BigBasket to DMart, and quick-commerce players like Zepto and Blinkit, are doubling down on their private label strategies, viewing them as a path to higher margins, stronger brand loyalty, and greater pricing control.
“Indian consumers’ growing preference for private labels reflects both short-term price pressures and a longer-term structural evolution in retail,” said Devangshu Dutta, CEO of Third Eyesight, speaking to Entrepreneur India.
Trending globally
The surge isn’t unique to India. A recent report by the Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD) notes that globally, private labels now account for over 45 per cent of grocery volume and are expanding faster than legacy brands.
In India, this shift is becoming increasingly visible in-store. The EY report found that 74 per cent of consumers have noticed more private label options where they shop, and 70 per cent say these products are now displayed more prominently, often placed at eye level, signalling a strategic retail push.
Commenting on this trend, Angshuman Bhattacharya, Partner and National Leader, Consumer Products and Retail Sector, EY-Parthenon, said, “Consumer behaviour has traditionally evolved in response to changing economic situations, but the current shifts appear to be more permanent. Retailers are confidently launching private labels and allocating prime shelf space to them, while technology is enhancing the shopping experience by providing consumers with limitless options and the ability to compare products.”
From price-fighters to power brands
According to Dutta, private labels are no longer just “copycat” alternatives meant to undercut national brands.
“For retailers, not just in India but globally, lookalike private labels used to be tools at the opening price point to hook the customer, who saw them as credible, affordable alternatives to national brands,” he explained, adding, “However, as retailers have grown, they have gained both scale and expertise to widen and deepen their supply chains.”
Over time, he said, investments in formulation, packaging, and quality consistency have increased consumer trust.
“Private labels now compete on functional benefits rather than only on price, particularly in food staples and apparel, but also in brown goods and white goods, and increasingly in personal care and other FMCG categories,” he added. [Must read: “Private Label Maturity Model”]
Retailers scale up private labels
As demand for in-house brands grows, retailers are scaling up their strategies across sectors.
BigBasket, one of India’s largest online grocery platforms, reported that 35–40 per cent of its FY24 sales came from private labels like Fresho, BB Royal, and Tasties. The company aims to push this share closer to 45 per cent through expansion in frozen foods and ready-to-eat categories.
DMart’s private label arm, Align Retail, has reportedly more than doubled its sales in two years, touching INR 3,322 crore in FY25. The retailer’s in-house brands in staples, apparel, and home essentials have helped boost margins in a highly competitive retail landscape.
Zepto, the quick-commerce player, is taking private labels into the 10-minute delivery domain. Its brand Relish, focused on meats and eggs, has achieved INR 40 crore in monthly sales.
Meanwhile, Reliance Retail has also expanded its portfolio of private labels, including Good Life, Enzo, and Puric, across groceries, personal care, and household products, strengthening its broader FMCG play. In 2024, Reliance Retail’s Tira Beauty also announced the launch of its latest private label brand, Nails Our Way, signifying a major expansion in its beauty offerings.
Capturing a lion’s share in retail
Dutta noted that in India, private labels will remain a core pillar of modern retail strategy rather than a cyclical response to cost pressures.
“Consumers increasingly view retailers as brand owners rather than intermediaries. As private labels mature in branding and innovation, their growth aligns more and more with brand equity development rather than just opportunistic cost-saving,” he said.
From a retailer’s perspective, private labels deliver higher gross margins and greater strategic control, Dutta said. [Must read: “Private Label Maturity Model”]
Another report by the Private Label Manufacturers Association (PLMA), using Circana data, found that in 2024, private-label sales in food and non-edible categories grew faster than bigger brands globally. While figures vary by region and quarter, the pattern remains consistent: private labels are outpacing traditional FMCG growth.
Collectively, these shifts show that private labels are becoming a major revenue driver for retailers in India, and are fast evolving from value alternatives into brands with genuine consumer pull.
(Published in Entrepreneur India)
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August 6, 2025
Naini Thaker, Forbes India
Aug 06, 2025
It’s a known fact that of the thousands of startups founded each year, only a small fraction survive—and even fewer scale to become unicorns. Rarer still are those unicorns which, after reaching dizzying heights, come crashing down. The Good Glamm Group is one such cautionary tale.
Once celebrated as a unicorn that cracked the code on content-to-commerce, the company’s meteoric rise was matched only by the speed of its unravelling. At the heart of its downfall lies a critical misstep: The relentless pursuit of growth through acquisitions and brand launches, even as cracks in its house-of-brands model began to show. Instead of pausing to consolidate and build sustainably, Good Glamm doubled down—prioritising valuation over viability.
That strategy came to a head on July 23 when founder and CEO Darpan Sanghvi announced the dissolution of the group’s house-of-brands structure. In a LinkedIn post, Sanghvi confirmed that lenders would now oversee the sale of individual brands, effectively ending the company’s vision of building a digital-first FMCG conglomerate.
Despite raising $30 million in 2024 and undergoing multiple rounds of restructuring, the group failed to integrate its acquisitions or generate sustainable profitability. With key investors such as Accel and Bessemer Venture Partners exiting the board and leadership turnover accelerating, the company’s ambitious empire—built on rapid expansion and aggressive brand aggregation—has now been reduced to a lender-led breakup.
In the aftermath of the announcement, Sanghvi offered a candid reflection on what went wrong. “In hindsight, it wasn’t one decision, one market force, or one acquisition. It was three levers we pulled, which together, turned Momentum into a Trap,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post. According to Sanghvi, the group’s downfall stemmed from doing “too much, too fast and too big”.
He elaborated: “At first, Momentum feels like your greatest ally. Every headline, every funding round, every big launch is a shot of adrenaline. And you start believing you can do more and more and more. But momentum has a dark side. If you stop steering and go in a hundred different directions, it doesn’t just carry you forward, it drags you faster and faster until you can’t breathe.”
Where The Model Broke?
In October 2017, Sanghvi launched direct-to-consumer (DTC) beauty brand MyGlamm. Most brands at the time were big on selling on marketplaces such as Amazon or Nykaa. However, Sanghvi believed, “We wanted to be truly DTC and not just digitally enabled. We believed that to own the customer, the transaction needs to happen on our own platform.”
But the biggest challenge with being a DTC brand is its customer acquisition cost (CAC). Towards the end of 2019, the company was spending about $15 (over ₹1,000) to acquire a customer to transact on their website. “Around the same time, our revenue run rate was ₹100 crore. We were spending about $0.5 million to acquire 30,000 customers a month. That’s when we realised it was time to solve the CAC problem,” Sanghvi told Forbes India in 2022. In an attempt to find a solution, Sanghvi turned to the content-to-commerce model.
And then, started the acquisition spree. According to Sanghvi, with a single brand in a single category one can’t build scale. He told Forbes India, “The most you can scale it is ₹1,000 crore, if you want a company that’s doing ₹8,000 or ₹10,000 crore in revenue, it has to be multiple brands across multiple categories.” In hindsight, this perspective might be debatable.
As Devangshu Dutta, founder of consultancy Third Eyesight, points out, the “house of brands” model is essentially a modern-day consumer-facing business conglomerate—and its success hinges on multiple factors working in harmony. While there are examples globally and in India of such models thriving, both privately and publicly, the reality is far more nuanced. “Brands take time to grow, and organisations take time to mature,” Dutta notes, emphasising that rapid aggregation of founder-led businesses under a single ownership umbrella is no guarantee of success.
In recent years, Dutta feels the influx of capital into early-stage startups and copycat models—often seen as lower risk due to their success in other geographies—has shortened business lifecycles and inflated expectations. The hope is that synergies across the portfolio will unlock outsized value, but that rarely plays out as planned. “It is well-documented that more than 70 percent of mergers and acquisitions fail,” he adds, citing reasons such as weak brand fundamentals, lack of synergy, inadequate capital, limited management bandwidth, and internal misalignment.
In the case of Good Glamm, these fault lines became increasingly visible as the group expanded faster than it could integrate or stabilise.
Scaling Without Steering
In FY21, the company had losses of ₹43.63 crore, which rose to ₹362.5 crore in FY22 and went up to ₹917 crore in FY23. Despite the mounting losses, Good Glamm marked its entry into the US market, in a joint venture with tennis player Serena Williams to launch a new brand—Wyn Beauty by Serena Williams. The launch was in partnership with US-based beauty retailer Ulta Beauty.
For its international expansion, it invested close to ₹250 crore over three years. “We anticipate that the international business will account for 25 to 35 percent of our total group revenues by the end of next year. This strategic focus on international expansion is pivotal as we prepare for our IPO in October 2025,” he told Forbes India in April 2024.
Clearly, things didn’t pan out as expected. As Sanghvi rightly points out, it was indeed a momentum trap. “You tell yourself you’ll fix the leaks after the next milestone. But the milestones keep coming, and so do the leaks. Soon, you’re running from fire to fire, never realising that the whole building is getting hotter. And somewhere along the way, you lose the stillness to think,” he writes on his LinkedIn post.
Dutta feels that a strong balance sheet is the most fundamental requirement, “to provide growth-funding for the acquisitions or for allowing the time needed for the acquisitions to mature into self-sustaining businesses over years. In the case of VC-funded businesses, the pressure to scale in a short time can go against what may be best for the business or for its individual brands”.
The Good Glamm Group’s fall is a reminder that scale alone doesn’t build resilience. Its story reflects the risks of expanding faster than a business can integrate, and of prioritising valuation over value. The house-of-brands model can work—but only when backed by strategic clarity, operational discipline, and patience. This is less a warning and more a reminder for founders: Scale is not success, and speed is not strategy.
(Published in Forbes India)
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July 28, 2025
By Meenakshi Verma Ambwani, Hindu Businessline
New Delhi, July 28, 2025
Nykaa said that Kay Beauty, co-founded with actor Katrina Kaif, has crossed the ₹240 crore mark in terms of Gross Merchandise Value.
Stars from the tinsel town are donning the entrepreneurial hat to venture into the beauty and fashion business space. Some have even succeeded in growing their brands sustainably, earning big bucks.
Take for instance Skincare brand Hyphen, co-founded by actor Kriti Sanon with Pep Brands, which recently touched the ₹400 crore-mark in Annual Recurring Revenues.
Tarun Sharma, CEO and co-founder, Hyphen told businessline: “The brand is witnessing healthy growth rate quarter-on-quarter. In the first year itself, it touched ₹100 crore ARR. We had aimed for ₹500 crore ARR in 3-4 years and, within two years, we are at ₹400crore ARR.” Pep Brands led by Sharma owns mCaffeine and Hyphen.
The model that works
Sharma believes an operator-led, celebrity anchored model works better. ”The operator can bring in the necessary financial and execution muscle. If a celeb partners with an operator that has deep expertise in the space, then there is huge potential for growth,” he added.
“Product launches, marketing and distribution are very data-driven at Pep Brands. It guides us on what to launch, when to launch, and how to launch products. That has helped Hyphen in achieving this kind of growth rate. It is by design that the majority of the business of Hyphen is D2C,” Sharma explained.
In May, Nykaa said that Kay Beauty, co-founded with actor Katrina Kaif, has crossed the ₹240 crore mark in terms of Gross Merchandise Value. On an earnings call for Q4FY25, Adwaita Nayar, Executive Director, Chief Executive Officer, Nykaa Fashion, said: “Kay Beauty is one of the fastest-growing brands on the platform. It’s hit about ₹240 crore of GMV. The innovations have been fantastic this year. So, it is quite a premium brand, and I think the consumers are accepting it even at that price point. It’s got great gross margins.”
Earlier this year, Reliance Retail Ventures announced that it has decided to acquire 51 per cent stake in Ed-a-Mamma , a kid and maternity wear brand founded by actor Alia Bhatt. According to some reports, Hrithik Roshan’s sportswear brand HRX is a ₹1,000 crore brand.
Among the recent entrants are Ranbir Kapoor, who has decided to foray in the apparel and accessories space with ARKS. Launched in February, the brand has also launched its first store in Mumbai, followed by a second store in New Delhi and another with Broadway in Hyderabad.
‘Shift in preferences’
Abhinav Verma, co-founder and CEO, ARKS, told businessline: “We are seeing a shift in consumer preferences towards made-in-India brands. We decided to leverage on the strong manufacturing capability that India has to build a brand that is both aspirational and offers value. We are looking to build a ₹100 crore brand in the next 3-4 years with a strong omni-channel strategy.”
“The success of some of these brands demonstrates that building on consumer relevance and with powerful time-bound execution, celebrity ventures can become significant players in a crowded market. With consumer demand for relatability and digital-first branding on the rise, this segment will definitely grow. However, only brands that offer genuine value to consumers, and not just star appeal, are likely to endure,” said Devangshu Dutta, CEO, Third Eyesight.
(Published in The Hindu-Businessline)
