To market or not to market? Falguni Nayar has the answer

Traffic, transactions — and revenue grew for Nykaa in FY 2021, even after it reduced marketing and advertising expenses. Now, its CEO is changing gears.

Saturday November 27, 2021 , 3 min Read

Good Morning,

In 2019, it dawned upon Falguni Nayar that Nykaa was ready for a public listing. However, COVID-19 forced her to reevaluate her plans.

With consumer footfall falling by nearly 60 percent and the restrictions limiting Nykaa to operate from only 80 stores, the company had to make drastic cuts in marketing and advertising expenses in FY21 — lowering it by 16 percent to Rs 170 crore.

However, the pandemic brought millions of Indians online, and despite the beauty and personal platform cutting its marketing and advertising expenses, almost 97 percent of its gross merchandise value (GMV) was transacted online — with the site clocking 658.9 million visits in FY21.

This led Nykaa CEO to shift gears. In the quarter ended September 2021, the marketing and advertisement expenses increased to 13.7 percent of the operational revenue.

"In a very conscious manner, we are (now) increasing our marketing spends because they were artificially depressed in the first half of FY 2021 and the period of COVID impact," the self-made billionaire told equity analysts on November 15, 2021.

Nykaa got listed on November 10, opening at Rs 2,018 as against the issue price of Rs 1,125. Being listed for 12 days, Nykaa has been trading at a premium of 77.3 percent against its lowest price of Rs 1,994.1.

The Interview

Saurabh Saxena, Site Leader and Vice-President (Product Development), Intuit India describes the digital accounting solutions company as a 38-year-old startup that believes in constantly evolving to create impactful financial solutions.

In an engaging chat, Saurabh talks about how Intuit India is building new-age innovation systems that help customers be more confident about their money-related decisions, its artificial intelligence-driven capabilities and its plans to venture into omnichannel solutions.

Editor’s Pick: Tulja Tooling

Machine tooling business involves manufacturing components, which, like many other industries, is dominated by men. But Tulja Sukhdayalsing Sharma aka Rani Tulja did not let that fact bring her down and chose to set up her own tooling workshop, called Tulja Tooling.

Today, she has expanded the market of her products to neighbouring Kolhapur, Nagpur, and other states like Gujarat and Punjab. She has five machines, and does the design, technical work, and marketing herself. Read more.

Startup Spotlight

Helping men up loungewear game

Bengaluru-based D2C (direct-to-consumer) clothing startup DaMENSCH, which began by selling men’s innerwear, has now expanded to loungewear. It has grown to 5,000 orders every day and aims to clock Rs 300 crore annual recurring revenue (ARR) by October 2022.

Launched in 2018, the company says it has grown 3X post lockdown. Read More.

News & Updates

Online tutoring platform Vedantu has announced its first liquidity event for shares under the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).

Bengaluru-based Kinara Capital has launched myKinara mobile app to provide collateral-free loans to MSMEs within 24 hours. The app comes with a simple three-step process — a first-of-its-kind in the unsecured MSME business lending space.

Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said cryptocurrency is here to stay and that it is fundamentally based on cryptography, the study of secure communications techniques.