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Nykaa CEO: “Learning About India Beyond Delhi, Mumbai Most Fascinating” – NDTV Profit

Shares of beauty start-up Nykaa made a blockbuster debut on Wednesday with its market capitalisation crossing Rs 1 lakh crore. Shares of FSN E-Commerce Ventures, the company that owns the Nykaa brand, opened for trading at Rs 2,018 on the National Stock Exchange, up 79 per cent from its issue price of Rs 1,125 per share and rose as much as 99 per cent to hit an intraday high of Rs 2,235 on the NSE.

After successful listing on stock markets, Falguni Nayar, founder of the beauty start-up told NDTV that Nykaa has in many ways created beauty industry in the country.

“In 2012 when I started beauty was 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 large geographically and ethnically diverse country,” Falguni Nayar said.

“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.

Ms Nayar said that learning about the country beyond big cities like Mumbai and Delhi has been the most fascinating thing in business.

“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,” Ms Nayar said.

Ms Nayar who was herself an IPO banker earlier, said that it has been fantastic 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 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,” Ms Nayar added.