Nykaa Man and the Expansion of Men’s Beauty Consumption

Industry & Competitive Context

India’s men’s grooming category evolved through the 2010s from a functional segment (soaps, talcum powder, basic deodorants) into what industry analysts at Technopak described as an aspirational one, shaped by rising urban incomes, smartphone penetration, and growing exposure to global grooming trends through social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp. By 2019, Nykaa’s own chief business officer, Nihir Parikh, estimated the men’s grooming industry in India to be close to Rs. 100 billion in size and growing at roughly 10% annually. Category composition data from a 2017 Assocham study showed shaving products as the largest sub-segment, followed by deodorants and antiperspirants, with bath and shower, skincare, and hair care trailing behind. Separately, AC Nielsen estimated the men’s skincare market specifically at Rs. 5.75 billion, expanding at approximately 20% over the preceding decade evidence that skincare, though smaller in absolute terms, was the fastest-growing sub-category within men’s grooming.

The competitive field that Nykaa entered was already populated by both legacy FMCG incumbents and venture-backed direct-to-consumer (D2C) challengers. Emami’s Fair and Handsome, launched in 2005 and fronted by Shah Rukh Khan as brand ambassador from 2007, held a 63.7% share of its category and contributed about 9% of Emami’s FY18 revenue of Rs. 25.40 billion. Marico had repositioned its legacy Set Wet brand with tiered pricing (a Rs. 10 pack and a Rs. 49 pocket spray alongside a premium Set Wet Studio X line) and had acquired a 43% stake in the D2C brand Beardo in November 2017, with plans to make it wholly owned by March 2020. Emami had invested close to $3 million in The Man Company in 2017, later increasing its stake to around 30%. Colgate-Palmolive Asia Pacific made its first Indian investment Rs. 180 million (about $2.6 million) in Bombay Shaving Company. Godrej Consumer Products extended its Cinthol personal-care franchise into face wash and beard shampoos, while Hindustan Unilever launched an exclusive male grooming line under Brylcreem in partnership with Amazon. On the pure-play retail side, Limeroad and Voonik had already rolled out dedicated men’s shopping verticals before Nykaa did, indicating that multi-brand platforms, not just product manufacturers, were racing to capture the male shopper.

Nykaa itself had been built, since its 2012 founding by Falguni Nayar, as a multi-brand beauty retailer serving primarily women, with an omnichannel footprint of 17 physical stores (across its Nykaa Luxe and Nykaa On Trend formats) by April 2018 and a catalogue exceeding 100,000 SKUs. Reported FY18 net revenue stood at Rs. 570 crore, up from Rs. 214 crore in FY17, and the company had closed a Series D round of Rs. 165 crore (about $24.45 million) in May 2018, taking cumulative funding to roughly Rs. 255 crore (about $37 million). Nykaa was, by its own account at the time, the largest online beauty retailer in India, holding close to a third of the online beauty products market.

Brand Situation Prior to Campaign

Before the formal launch of a men’s vertical, Nykaa’s male engagement was already material but under-served by a dedicated shopping experience. Nihir Parikh noted that roughly 15% of Nykaa’s social media following and about 20% of site traffic came from men and male grooming products. Despite this traffic, men’s grooming contributed only about 2% of Nykaa’s overall revenue at the time a clear gap between stated interest (traffic, social following) and realized commercial contribution. This mismatch between top-of-funnel male engagement and bottom-of-funnel conversion is the central business problem that preceded the creation of a dedicated men’s platform.

Strategic Objective

Nykaa’s publicly stated objective, as reported by the Economic Times and corroborated across multiple trade publications in July 2018, was to grow men’s grooming from approximately 2% to approximately 10% of overall company revenue within “a couple of years.” This was not framed as a brand-awareness campaign in the conventional sense but as a category-creation and conversion exercise: building a dedicated commerce destination to convert an already-present but under-monetized male audience into transacting customers, rather than acquiring an entirely new audience from zero.

Campaign Architecture & Execution

Nykaa’s approach was structured in at least two publicly documented phases.

The first phase, reported around July 6–7, 2018, was the launch of NykaaMan.com, described in later company-adjacent coverage as India’s first multi-brand beauty e-commerce store dedicated to men’s grooming. The platform was reported to host up to 200 brands at launch, including The Shave Doctor, Kiehl’s, Clinique for Men, and Beardo all of which already sold through Nykaa’s main site or other retail channels, indicating that the men’s vertical was initially built by re-architecting an existing supply base into a dedicated storefront rather than by sourcing an entirely new brand roster. The category structure spanned shaving products, hair care, grooming kits, beard care, bath and body/bath accessories, sexual wellness, and sports nutrition, supplemented with trend blogs and grooming advice content mirroring the content-plus-commerce model Nykaa had already established on its women’s platform.

The second documented phase came more than two years later, on October 6, 2020, when Nykaa Fashion extended its platform to include a men’s fashion category on both website and app, explicitly built to complement rather than replace the existing Nykaa Man grooming business. At this stage, the company reported a combined 560-plus brands and more than 42,000 products spanning men’s fashion and grooming, with named fashion partners including GAP, Louis Philippe, Raymond, Adidas, Skechers, Pepe Jeans, and Hidesign. Nykaa’s Chief Marketing Officer, Anchit Nayar, was quoted describing the expansion as extending “curation, content and convenience to both women and men across India,” paired with a guarantee of 100% authenticity on products sold.

Positioning & Consumer Insight

The consumer insight underlying the launch, as articulated by Nykaa’s own executives in contemporaneous press coverage, rested on two observations: that a meaningful share of Nykaa’s existing audience was already male (traffic and social-following data cited above), and that this audience’s needs were distinct enough from the women’s shopping journey to merit a separate, purpose-built destination rather than a product filter bolted onto the existing site. This reflects a segmentation logic common to category-extension strategy: rather than treating men as a sub-segment of an existing storefront, Nykaa treated them as a distinct demand pool requiring its own curation logic, navigation, and content layer an approach consistent with how dedicated men’s-only platforms (Limeroad’s and Voonik’s men’s verticals, and D2C-first brands like Beardo, Ustraa, and The Man Company) were simultaneously validating male-specific retail experiences elsewhere in the market.

The subsequent 2020 extension into fashion reflects a broadening of this insight: grooming alone was treated as one component of a wider male “lifestyle” opportunity that also included apparel, footwear, and accessories, aligning with Technopak’s broader industry observation that the category had shifted from functional to aspirational positioning over this period.

Media & Channel Strategy

The available public record documents the platform architecture (a dedicated URL and later a standalone app), the brand and product catalogue, and executive commentary on rationale, but does not disclose a campaign media plan. Separately, industry-wide commentary from the period (KPMG’s Harsha Razdan, cited in trade press, was described as bullish on category growth given rising consumer awareness of skin, hair, and beard types) provides useful context on the broader advertising environment male grooming brands operated within, but this commentary is not specific to Nykaa Man’s own media choices.

Business & Brand Outcomes

Documented, publicly disclosed outcomes specific to Nykaa Man are limited. The clearest disclosed figures are the pre-launch baseline (approximately 2% of overall Nykaa revenue from men’s grooming) and the company’s stated multi-year target (approximately 10% of revenue). Nykaa’s consolidated financial reporting following its 2021 public listing discloses company-wide revenue and GMV (for example, FY25 group-level results reported strong year-on-year growth and GMV of approximately Rs. 15,600 crore, alongside an expanded omnichannel footprint), but these figures are reported at the consolidated group level across Beauty and Fashion segments rather than broken out for the men’s grooming or Nykaa Man sub-vertical specifically, so no segment-level conclusion can be drawn from them for this case.

What can be stated with confidence from verified sources is structural: Nykaa expanded its male-facing proposition twice over a documented multi-year period first as a dedicated grooming storefront in 2018, then as an integrated fashion-and-grooming proposition in 2020 and both moves were publicly framed by company executives as deliberate, multi-year category-building efforts rather than one-off marketing campaigns.

Strategic Implications

Several transferable strategic principles emerge from the verified record of Nykaa Man’s development, independent of any single outcome metric.

First, Nykaa’s sequencing launching a dedicated commerce destination before (or instead of) leading with a flagship advertising campaign suggests a “build the shelf before you advertise the shelf” logic. The company used existing engagement signals (traffic share, social following) as justification for infrastructure investment, converting a passive audience signal into an active commerce surface, rather than attempting to generate male demand from a cold start through brand advertising alone.

Second, the initial reliance on brands already present on Nykaa’s main platform (Kiehl’s, Clinique for Men, Beardo, The Shave Doctor) indicates a capital-efficient entry strategy: category expansion was achieved substantially through re-merchandising an existing supplier relationship base rather than through new, exclusive brand acquisition or large upfront inventory risk a pattern consistent with how multi-brand retail platforms typically de-risk new vertical launches relative to single-brand D2C entrants.

Third, the gap between Nykaa’s 2% baseline and its stated 10% ambition a five-fold revenue-share target represents a significant strategic bet relative to the category’s underlying growth rate (approximately 10% annually per Nihir Parikh’s 2019 estimate). Closing that gap through market growth alone would have been arithmetically difficult within “a couple of years,” implying the company’s internal expectation was share gain from incumbents and D2C competitors, not category tailwinds alone. The absence of later disclosed figures confirming or disconfirming attainment of the 10% target is itself an instructive data point for case discussion: it illustrates how companies frequently publicize directional ambitions at category-entry stage without later disclosing segment-specific performance against those same targets, which complicates any outside assessment of campaign effectiveness using public information alone.

Fourth, the two-phase structure (grooming-only platform in 2018, followed by an integrated fashion-and-grooming platform in 2020) suggests that Nykaa treated “men’s beauty consumption” as an evolving, broadening category rather than a static one moving from a narrowly defined grooming consumer to a more broadly defined lifestyle consumer as the underlying market (and competitive intensity from Beardo, The Man Company, Bombay Shaving Company, Ustraa, and FMCG incumbents such as Emami and Marico) itself matured.

Discussion Questions

1. Nykaa justified its 2018 entry into men’s grooming using traffic and social-following data (20% and 15% respectively) despite men’s grooming contributing only about 2% of revenue at the time. What are the risks and merits of using top-of-funnel engagement metrics, rather than conversion or revenue data, to justify a new category launch?

2. Nykaa initially populated NykaaMan.com largely with brands already sold on its main platform (Kiehl’s, Clinique for Men, Beardo) rather than exclusive or newly acquired brands. What does this reveal about the trade-offs between speed-to-market and differentiation when a multi-brand retailer enters an adjacent category?

3. Nykaa set a public target of growing men’s grooming from roughly 2% to roughly 10% of overall revenue within a couple of years, against a category growing at only about 10% annually. Evaluate whether this target was primarily achievable through category growth, competitive share gain, or a combination of both, and what that implies about the underlying strategic assumptions.

4. By 2020, Nykaa had broadened its men’s proposition from grooming alone into fashion and grooming combined, while competitors such as Beardo, The Man Company, and Bombay Shaving Company remained grooming-focused D2C specialists. What are the comparative advantages and risks of a multi-category “lifestyle platform” strategy versus a focused single-category specialist strategy in an emerging consumption segment?

5. Public disclosures reviewed for this case do not include a segment-specific, audited revenue figure for Nykaa Man even several years after launch. What does this gap in public disclosure suggest about how analysts, investors, or case researchers should interpret company-stated category ambitions when no later verifiable outcome data is published?