Varun Alagh

Timeline

1. Before 2016Works in consumer brand building, the background he brought to his own company.
2. 2013Marries Ghazal Alagh, whom he knew from his early years in north India.
3. 2014His first son, Agastya, is born and develops a skin condition that the products then sold in India could not treat.
4. 2016He and Ghazal Alagh found Honasa Consumer and launch Mamaearth, putting in Rs 25 lakh, described as the couple's entire life savings.
5. 2016Mamaearth begins selling online with a small baby care range and no shelf space in physical retail.
6. 2020The company turns profitable and The Derma Co is added as a second brand built on active ingredients.
7. 2021Honasa closes FY21 with a net profit of Rs 24.6 crore against a loss of Rs 5.9 crore in FY20.
8. January 2022The company raises about 52 million dollars from Sequoia Capital and is widely described as India's first unicorn of the year.
9. February 2022Honasa buys the salon hair care brand BBlunt for about Rs 135 crore.
10. 2023Dr Sheth's is acquired and Honasa files its draft papers for a listing in Mumbai.
11. 7 November 2023Honasa Consumer lists on the NSE and the BSE, with Varun Alagh running a publicly traded company.
12. 2024He launches Project Neev, replacing super stockists with direct distributors across the top cities.
13. September quarter of FY25The reset costs the company a quarter, which closes with a loss of Rs 18.71 crore and a fall in revenue.
14. November 2024The shares fall sharply after the weak quarter and the stock trades below the price at which it listed.
15. 2025He buys shares worth Rs 50 crore from Fireside Ventures in a block deal, lifting his personal stake to about 32.45 per cent.
16. 2025Honasa buys BTM Ventures, the owner of the men's grooming brand Reginald Men, for about Rs 195 crore.
17. October 2025The company's market capitalisation is put at about Rs 9,250 crore as the founders argue the reset has worked.
18. FY26Honasa returns to growth and closed the March quarter with a profit of about Rs 69 crore on revenue of Rs 657 crore.
19. 2026He takes his wife's seat on the panel of Shark Tank India for season 5.
20. June quarter of FY27The company posts its best quarter, with revenue of Rs 756 crore and a profit after tax of Rs 90 crore.
21. September 2026A block deal worth Rs 643 crore sees early investors sell about 4.4 per cent of the company at about Rs 450 a share.
22. 2026He and Ghazal Alagh set out a target of Rs 5,550 crore in revenue and a 15 per cent EBITDA margin by FY31.

Early life and family

Varun Alagh has kept his early life almost entirely out of the public record. He has not published a date of birth, and his Wikidata record does not exist at all, which is unusual for the chief executive of a listed Indian consumer company and is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. What can be said with confidence is that he is based in the Delhi region, that he was in north India before the couple moved through Mumbai and back to the national capital region, and that his family now lives in a house that holds four generations under one roof ^[12].

He is married to Ghazal Alagh, whom he knew well before either of them built anything. The two are frequently described in the Indian press as childhood acquaintances from Chandigarh, and their marriage predates the company by several years. Their elder son, Agastya, was born in 2014. Their younger son, Ayaan, was born in 2022, during the busiest stretch of Mamaearth's growth ^[10].

The couple's household is unusual for a founder family in that it is a joint one by design. Ghazal Alagh has described her grandmother, her parents, the two of them and the two children sharing the same home, and has said the arrangement is what makes their travel heavy working lives possible ^[12]. That is a practical fact about how a chief executive of a listed company organises his week, and it is more useful to a reader than most of what is written about founders' private lives.

His public profile began with his wife's, not the other way round. When Indian outlets first wrote about Mamaearth they wrote about a mother who could not find safe products for her son, and about the husband who told her to stop complaining and do something about it ^[2]. Varun Alagh's contribution in those early stories was the money and the operations, and it took the company's listing for him to become the person most quoted about it.

Career before Mamaearth

Varun Alagh came to his own company from consumer brand building rather than from finance or technology. Indian press coverage of his television debut described his journey as one from brand builder to entrepreneur, and credited him with what the coverage called a proven playbook for building loved brands, with empathy led innovation and digital agility ^[8]. That is the language of a marketing career rather than an engineering one, and it fits the way he has run the company since.

The distinction matters because Honasa's early edge was never manufacturing or price. Mamaearth sold into a category where the incumbents had better factories and better distribution, and it won attention instead: reviews, ingredient explanations, content and a promise that parents could check. A founder who had spent his working life making brands legible to consumers was well placed to build that, and the division of labour in the company reflects it.

He has described the early marketing constraint bluntly in the company's own retelling. There was no money to behave like a large brand, so the marketing had to be earned rather than bought, and the founding couple built the first audience by answering questions about ingredients rather than by buying reach ^[1]. That constraint turned into the company's method, and he still talks about consumer insight as the only durable advantage in a consumer business.

The public record does not disclose where he studied, and this page does not guess. It is worth saying plainly that a reader who wants his school or college will not find it here, because no reliable interview or filing has put it on the record. What the record does show is a founder who learned the packaged goods business by running one, which is a longer route than an MBA and a better one for what he had to do.

Starting Mamaearth with Ghazal Alagh

Honasa Consumer was incorporated in 2016 with Rs 25 lakh of the couple's savings, which Ghazal Alagh has described as their entire life savings and which they put in with a young child at home and no fallback plan ^[1]. Varun Alagh's role in the founding story is the quieter one in the folklore: his contribution was to insist that a complaint about Indian baby products could become a company, and then to organise the parts of it that were not product or design.

The company he built is a house of brands rather than a single brand. Honasa now owns Mamaearth, The Derma Co, Aqualogica, Ayuga, Dr Sheth's, BBlunt and Staze, with newer additions in men's grooming, oral care and fragrances ^[2]. As chief executive he owns the shape of that portfolio, the decision about when to build a brand and when to buy one, and the discipline of keeping each brand's argument distinct.

His public framing of the business is deliberately repeatable rather than visionary. In a message to shareholders in the company's annual report, the founders said the goal was to build a company that can find a need, prove a product, scale a brand and make it profitable faster than anyone else, and then simply do it again. They added that the revenue number is only ever a consequence of that ^[5]. It is a manufacturing line description of a beauty company, and it is how he talks about it in interviews as well.

He has also been the one to say out loud what the company's brand architecture implies. When Mamaearth's natural positioning came under pressure from actives led rivals, the response was not to remake Mamaearth but to build and buy brands that could argue the scientific case instead ^[2]. That is a portfolio answer to a positioning problem, and it is a chief executive's answer rather than a marketer's.

Business career as chief executive

Varun Alagh runs Honasa Consumer as chairman, chief executive and co-founder, a combination that puts him across both the board and the operating week ^[4]. For the first seven years of the company's life that meant building an online first business with a distribution footprint that barely existed. After the listing in November 2023 it meant something harder: running a public company that has to explain itself to investors every quarter while the market it sells into moves beneath it ^[5].

His operating doctrine, as he has stated it publicly, is narrowing rather than widening. When the company's numbers slumped in FY25, his response was to cut the number of categories and stock keeping units it was pursuing and concentrate on what the company calls focus categories: face cleansers, shampoos, sunscreens, moisturisers, face serums, lipsticks and baby care ^[2]. Those seven areas now contribute about 80 per cent of revenue ^[5].

He has been candid that the company had gone too wide. In an earnings call he said the company needed to make strong tweaks in the product mix and be sharper about where it allocates investment, and that narrowing the focus to a few categories and going deep within the hero products was the way out ^[2]. Statements like that cost a chief executive credibility with the market in the short term, because they admit the previous plan was wrong, and they are the reason the FY25 numbers are still quoted against him.

The results of the narrowing showed up in FY26 and FY27. The March quarter of FY26 closed with revenue of Rs 657 crore, up 23.2 per cent, and profit up about 2.9 times, with EBITDA margin expanding sharply to about 11.7 per cent ^[7]. The June quarter of FY27 was the best in the company's history: revenue of Rs 756 crore, up 27 per cent, a profit after tax of Rs 90 crore, up about 116 per cent, and EBITDA margin of 14.6 per cent ^{[4] [11]}.

In that quarter he described the strategy as working, with growth coming from both the core brands and the younger ones, and said the focus was to keep building a house of brands by staying close to the core, sharpening category playbooks and staying disciplined on capital allocation and talent density ^[4]. That sentence is a fair summary of how he runs the company: the growth is the output, and the inputs are category discipline, money and people.

Project Neev and the distribution reset

The most consequential decision Varun Alagh has made is one the public rarely associates with a beauty brand: he rebuilt the company's distribution. Until early 2024 Honasa sold through super stockists, large intermediaries who sat between the company and the distributors and gave it little visibility into where its inventory actually was. He concluded that the model could not support a company that wanted to compete on the shelves of pharmacies, cosmetic stores and supermarkets, and he started replacing it ^[2].

The programme was called Project Neev, and it replaced a two layered channel with a single layer of direct distributors in the top fifty cities. The intent was control: better visibility of demand, stronger relationships with retailers and cleaner replenishment. In his own words on an earnings call, the distribution system the company had meant it carried relatively higher inventory in the channel than other industries, which took investment away from in market spending ^[2].

The execution was worse than the plan. The company had guided for an impact of roughly 150 basis points from rightsizing inventory, and the actual cost of the transition when it was nearly complete was far higher. In the September quarter of FY25, Honasa reported a loss of Rs 18.71 crore against a profit a year earlier, and revenue contracted ^[2]. Distribution partners pushed back publicly, and the company had to clarify that its value chain carried about Rs 40.69 crore of inventory rather than the much larger figure a distributors' federation had been quoted on.

Investors punished the stock hard. The shares fell below the price at which they had listed in November 2023 and stayed under pressure into 2025, and by October 2025 the company's market capitalisation was being quoted at about Rs 9,250 crore ^[9]. Varun Alagh's public position through that year was consistent: the transition was necessary, the pain was temporary, and the company would come out of it with a distribution network that matched its ambition.

He was right about the outcome and the market was right about the cost. By FY26 both general trade and modern trade were growing more than 40 per cent, and outlet coverage had passed roughly three lakh fast moving consumer goods retail outlets ^[4]. Quick commerce, which barely featured in the company's plans when it listed, had become a material channel ^[3]. The lesson he has drawn from it publicly is about data rather than about distributors: the company wanted to know where its products were, and it paid a year of growth to find out.

Acquisitions, new categories and the house of brands

Varun Alagh has bought growth as well as built it, and the pattern of the deals is consistent. BBlunt, acquired for about Rs 135 crore in February 2022, brought salon hair care and professional credibility ^[10]. Dr Sheth's brought a dermatology led skincare brand. More recently the company has moved into categories that sit outside beauty altogether. It acquired BTM Ventures, the owner of the men's grooming brand Reginald Men, for about Rs 195 crore, and took a minority stake in Fang Oral Care ^[3].

The newer bets are deliberately small and option-like. Honasa launched Luminve to enter prestige skincare, and it entered fragrance with FIKN, which the company described as India's first elixir brand aimed at a large and underpenetrated category ^{[3] [4]}. Rather than build a fragrance brand from scratch at scale, the company buys or seeds a position, tests it with its own distribution, and decides later whether to push it.

He has described the priority for the portfolio as putting the younger brands at the centre of growth while Mamaearth remains the cash engine. In the June quarter of FY27, the younger brands grew more than 40 per cent, BTM Ventures crossed a Rs 150 crore annual run rate and had more than doubled since the acquisition, and The Derma Co reached a net sales value run rate of Rs 1,000 crore, which the company said made it the only Indian fast moving consumer goods player to build two Rs 1,000 crore brands in ten years ^[4].

The strategic logic he articulates is about how Indian consumers shop rather than about how brands are built. In the annual report message he and Ghazal Alagh wrote that discovery has moved to mobile phones, where beauty is found and debated through creators rather than told through mass media, that the path to purchase has fragmented across e commerce, quick commerce and general trade so a brand must win everywhere at once, and that the youngest consumers are setting the pace ^[5]. That is a description of a market where a single brand cannot cover the ground, which is the argument for a portfolio.

The company's own framing of scale is explicit: Honasa wants to be the fastest growing company in Indian fast moving consumer goods to reach the Rs 5,000 crore revenue mark, and to get to Rs 5,550 crore with a 15 per cent EBITDA margin by FY31 ^[5]. Brokerages have responded with a range of views rather than a single one, with SBI Securities publishing a buy rating and a target price of Rs 475 a share in mid 2026, seeing the company as a long term consumer play on premiumisation ^[7].

Net worth and shareholding

Varun Alagh's wealth is unusually legible for a founder of a company this size, because it sits in a listed company and the numbers are filed. After a block deal in 2025 in which he bought 18.52 lakh shares from Fireside Ventures at Rs 270 a share, a transaction worth about Rs 50 crore, his personal holding reached about 10.55 crore shares, or about 32.45 per cent of Honasa Consumer. The promoter and promoter group together held about 35.54 per cent ^[3].

The purchase was notable for two reasons. It was a promoter buying from an early investor rather than selling, which is rare when a stock has fallen, and it was priced at a discount to the then market price of about Rs 276.75, which is how block deals work. Fireside Ventures had backed the company in its seed round, held about 10.5 per cent at the time of the listing, and had been cutting that position down to below 1 per cent ^[3].

He has kept buying in smaller sizes as well, adding over 1.6 lakh shares in tranches and lifting his holding in stages before the larger block deal. Exchange filings after the sale of about 4.4 per cent of the company for Rs 643 crore in September 2026 put promoter entities at about 35.47 per cent, with public shareholders holding the rest ^[6]. The stock had risen about 60 per cent over 2026 by then and was trading near Rs 450 to Rs 448 during that transaction, against about Rs 237 in late 2024 ^[6].

His salary as chief executive is disclosed in the company's annual report and is modest by the standards of Indian listed company chiefs. The bulk of his economic interest is equity, which means his fortune and the company's share price move together. When Honasa lost more than half its market value between late 2023 and late 2024, he lost more in paper terms than almost any other single shareholder, and he did not sell.

The family's total wealth is usually reported by Indian outlets as a combined figure for the couple, because the promoter stake is held through family entities. When the company's market capitalisation was quoted at about Rs 9,250 crore in October 2025, that stake was worth roughly Rs 3,300 crore ^[9]. By September 2026, with the shares up about 60 per cent over the year, the same holding was worth materially more ^[6].

Wife and children

Varun Alagh is married to Ghazal Alagh, and the marriage is also the company's founding partnership. She took product, design and formulation and the title of chief innovation officer; he took the chief executive's chair, the money and the distribution. Their friends and interviewers describe a division that has held for a decade, including through the year when the company was losing money and the marriage was under the same pressure as the business ^[10].

Their elder son, Agastya, was born in 2014, and his skin condition is the reason Honasa exists. The family has spoken about it in interviews and has otherwise kept his life private, and this page follows the same line. Their younger son, Ayaan, was born in 2022, in the year the company was preparing to list. Both children appear in the couple's public posts occasionally, which is a choice parents who are public figures get to make and not something a directory should analyse.

He talks about parenting in the language of logistics rather than of inspiration. The household is a four generation one, with Ghazal Alagh's grandmother and parents in the same house, and he has described it as the reason two founders with heavy travel schedules can be present at home ^[12]. He has also said the family has ordinary habits rather than aspirational ones, and that the house is a working home with two children and a dog rather than a showpiece.

Personal life and interests

Varun Alagh's public personality is lighter than the one his quarterly commentary suggests. Coverage of the family home noted that he moves around it on a Segway, gliding through spaces too small for it, while his wife practises yoga and runs ^[12]. He is the one who appears in the couple's posts joking, and the one who does the introductions at company events while she talks about product.

His interests, as far as they are on the record, are domestic and quiet. He is a food and kitchen person, and the household mix of fennel, cardamom and herbs that is brewed as a tea in the house comes up in interviews with his wife more than with him. The couple bought an Audi e-tron electric car for about Rs 1.19 crore, which generated coverage mainly because a Shark Tank judge had bought an electric vehicle rather than because of the price.

He has been visible in his wife's public life rather than in a story of his own, which is worth stating because it reverses the usual pattern. She was the television judge first, the one with the public following and the speaking circuit, and he was the chief executive who did not give many interviews. His entry onto the Shark Tank panel in 2026 changed that in a single announcement ^[8].

Like his wife, he has spoken about the personal cost of building the company, though less often. He has said the early years involved a lot of travel and a lot of factories, and that the decision to use their entire savings meant there was no version of the story in which one of them kept a normal job. The couple's account of the founding is unusually free of the language of destiny: they say they had a problem, they had savings, and they had no plan B.

House and property

The family home in the Delhi region is the couple's most photographed asset and the only property that has been written about in detail. Camera crews have filmed inside it, and the reporting describes a warm, lived-in house rather than a designed showpiece, with two children, a dog and the four generations of the family sharing it. Ghazal Alagh's paintings hang through the rooms, which is why the interiors look like an artist's home rather than a founder's ^[12].

The house has an open balcony where the Aravalli ridge is visible, and a home bar that the couple use. The kitchen is in daily use and the family cooks, which is where the household's tea mix and dietary habits come from. Nothing in the coverage suggests the house was bought as an investment or as a statement, and no second property of the couple's has been reported.

Before this house there was a 600 square foot flat in Bandra, Mumbai, which the couple have described as the place where their married life actually started. Ghazal Alagh has said you could see the end of the room the moment you walked in, and that they cried when they moved out ^[12]. For a reader trying to understand what ten years of building a listed company actually changed for this family, the distance between that flat and the current house is the honest measure.

Varun Alagh has not been reported buying commercial property, land or a stake in another company as a personal investment outside his own. His disclosed wealth is shares in the company he runs, which is a coherent position for a chief executive who has repeatedly told investors that capital allocation discipline is one of the things he is measured on ^[4].

Shark Tank India

In 2026 Varun Alagh joined the panel of Shark Tank India for season 5, taking the seat his wife had occupied in the previous season. The announcement was made with his wife introducing him to the audience, which turned a casting decision into a piece of storytelling about a couple who had built one company together and now held the same chair in consecutive seasons ^[8].

His statement on joining was about the state of Indian entrepreneurship rather than about himself. He said the country's founder landscape was at an inflection point, driven by new age founders reshaping industries, and that he was excited to back ideas that could transform categories and uplift communities ^[8]. The panel he joined included Aman Gupta, Anupam Mittal, Namita Thapar, Vineeta Singh, Kunal Bahl and Mohit Yadav.

The role fits what he has become in public: a consumer operator rather than a generalist investor. His speaking engagements, his posts and his quarterly commentary are all about distribution, category building and the cost of getting positioning wrong, which is exactly the advice a founder pitching a consumer brand needs. On a panel with a mattress company chief executive, a food delivery founder and a jewellery marketplace founder, he is the packaged goods professional.

For a listed company, having its chief executive on the country's most watched business programme is a marketing decision as well as a personal one. Mamaearth and The Derma Co sell to precisely the audience that watches the show, and a chief executive explaining formulation and margins on camera is cheaper and more credible than an advertisement ^[2]. The show also puts him in front of founders he might later acquire, which is not an accident for a company that has bought several brands.

He has kept the television role modest in his own account. In interviews he talks about mentorship and about the founders who pitch rather than about his own screen time, and he has continued to run the company through the season. That contrast with his wife's fuller use of the platform, including mentorship sessions for the founders who appeared with her, may simply be a difference of temperament.

Public positions and how he talks about the market

Varun Alagh's public positions are narrower than his wife's and more operational, which is a deliberate division of labour in a company where one founder is the product voice and the other the financial one. He speaks in the language of channel, category and capital: which categories are working, what is happening to general trade, what quick commerce is doing to the mix, and how much of the growth is being bought.

On the market, his repeated argument is that Indian consumers are trading up and shifting towards newer and regional brands at the expense of legacy players. He has described a consumer shift towards newer brands as one of the structural changes in Indian fast moving consumer goods, and he has framed Honasa's opportunity as being positioned where that shift lands ^[5]. It is a claim the company's own growth supports and one that its competitors dispute.

He is also one of the few listed consumer chief executives who talks about digital discovery as the organising fact of the market. In the annual report message, the founders wrote that consumers now trust ingredient and efficacy claims only when they have checked them for themselves, and that the path to purchase has fragmented across channels so that a brand must win everywhere at once ^[5]. That is the argument for the company's omnichannel spending, and it is also a warning to brands that rely on a single channel.

On capital allocation he is explicit in a way that is unusual for a founder. The company's stated plan is to narrow the categories it competes in, spend behind the ones that work, and keep the rest of the portfolio running on lean support, with the target of a 15 per cent EBITDA margin by FY31 ^[5]. When a business is growing at this pace the temptation is to fund everything, and his public position is that he will not.

Awards and recognition

Varun Alagh's recognition has come to the company more than to him personally. Honasa Consumer's listing in November 2023 made both founders part of a small group of Indian consumer founders who have taken a direct to consumer business to the public markets, and his wife's television career made her the better known of the two ^[5]. The Shark Tank India seat is the first recognition that is specifically his.

The numbers that would justify an award are on the record. Honasa turned profitable in FY21, listed in FY24, survived a loss making reset in FY25, and by FY27 was posting a record quarter with profit of Rs 90 crore ^[4]. Very few Indian direct to consumer companies have been through that full cycle, and the number that have done it under the same chief executive is smaller still.

He has been named in Indian business coverage alongside his wife in most listicles about the company's founders, and the couple are regularly described as the parents of the Indian beauty and personal care direct to consumer wave. There is no verified record of a major individual award for him that predates the listing. This page records that rather than stretching the record to fill the space.

Controversies and criticism

The sharpest criticism Varun Alagh has faced is about his judgment on distribution. Project Neev was announced as a fix for a visibility problem and it cost the company a quarter of losses, a collapse in the share price and a wave of public complaints from the trade. The company had guided for about 150 basis points of impact and the eventual cost was far higher ^[2]. The criticism is fair and he has largely accepted it, which is why he now talks about narrowing rather than expanding.

Concentration is the second charge. Mamaearth is still Honasa's largest brand, and when a flagship stops growing the whole company stalls, which is what happened in FY25. The company's answer has been to build The Derma Co and the younger brands into genuine scale, and the June quarter of FY27 was the first clear evidence that it worked ^[4]. Until those brands earn as much on their own the criticism will not go away.

There is also the standing critique of the category, which he answers rather than avoids. Indian direct to consumer brands are accused of buying growth with advertising and of having no real differentiation once a large competitor copies the product. Honasa's own numbers give the critics material when advertising rises faster than revenue, and the company has responded by pointing to its profit history, negative working capital and the focus categories growing without a proportional rise in spend ^{[4] [7]}.

Since the listing, a fourth pressure has followed every public statement. The founders own about 35 per cent of a listed company, so an offhand remark about a competitor moves the stock, and a personal post becomes an investor relations problem. His public communication has become noticeably more disciplined than his wife's, which is the ordinary adjustment a chief executive makes when the audience stops being customers and starts being shareholders.

Reading the numbers

A reader trying to judge Varun Alagh should look at four numbers rather than at commentary. The first is revenue: Rs 756 crore in the June quarter of FY27, up 27 per cent year on year, against Rs 595 crore in the same quarter a year earlier ^[4]. The second is profit: Rs 90 crore of profit after tax in that quarter against about Rs 41 crore a year before, with EBITDA margin at 14.6 per cent ^{[4] [11]}.

The third is the balance sheet discipline the company claims and brokers repeat, negative working capital, which means the business is funded by its suppliers and customers rather than by the founders' cash ^[7]. The fourth is the growth of the non flagship brands, because that is the test of whether Honasa is a company or a brand: the younger brands grew more than 40 per cent in the quarter, and The Derma Co alone reached a Rs 1,000 crore net sales value run rate ^[4].

The counter numbers matter as much. The company's revenue target of Rs 5,550 crore by FY31 is roughly a doubling, and the last time it tried to change its distribution it lost a year ^[5]. The promoter stake is about 35.5 per cent, which is enough control and not enough to ignore public shareholders ^[3]. And the stock has already travelled from about Rs 237 in late 2024 to about Rs 450 in September 2026 and back down during a block deal, which is a reminder of how quickly sentiment in this sector moves ^[6].

What the record supports is a chief executive who made one expensive decision and got most of it right, who has been unusually willing to say in public that his earlier plan was too broad, and whose company is now producing the first set of numbers that justify the change ^{[2] [4]}. It does not yet support the claim that Honasa has escaped the single brand problem, because Mamaearth is still the cash engine and the younger brands are still smaller than it is.

Related entries

Varun Alagh's page is half of a pair. Ghazal Alagh is his wife, his co-founder and the chief innovation officer of the same company, and her page carries the product, design and television half of the story that this page summarises only where it touches the business ^[10]. Read together the two give a full account of how Honasa Consumer was actually run.

The company itself has its own entry. Honasa Consumer holds the portfolio, the financial history, the acquisitions and the brand by brand detail that a person's page cannot carry in full, including the BBlunt and Dr Sheth's purchases and the newer bets in men's grooming, oral care and fragrance ^[5]. A reader checking a number about the business should go there rather than to this page.

The third connection is the group of Indian founders who built direct to consumer companies in the same decade and have since had to prove that the model survives contact with general trade. Mamaearth's story and theirs are the same story told with different products, and the founders who are now answering the same questions about category concentration and advertising spend are the natural neighbours of this entry.