Nykaa


Nykaa is an Indian retail seller of beauty, wellness, and fashion products.

History

Falguni Nayar, a former managing director at Kotak Mahindra Capital Company, founded Nykaa in 2012. It was launched as an ecommerce portal curating a range of beauty and wellness products. The brand name Nykaa is derived from the Sanskrit word nayaka, meaning ‘one in the spotlight’.
In 2015, the company expanded from online-only to an omnichannel model and began selling fashion products.

Funding

Nykaa has raised money through multiple rounds of funding from the family office of Harsh Mariwala, Sunil Munjal and Zia Mody, TVS Shriram Growth Fund, Max Group and TPG Capital. In March 2020, it raised INR 100 crore from Steadview Capital.

Operations and services

Nykaa follows an inventory-based model with warehouses in Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore. In addition to its primary ecommerce business, it has an offline presence via 68 brick-and-mortar stores across the country. It claims to have over 3 lakh products across 1,500 brands.
It has two offline store formats called Nykaa Luxe and Nykaa On Trend. The Luxe format features Indian and international luxury beauty brands along with Nykaa Beauty, the in-house collection of beauty products. The latter format has products curated by category basis their popularity.
In 2015, Nykaa launched its collection of in-house beauty products. In March 2016, it introduced private labeled products in the bath and body care category.

Security and privacy issues

On 18 November 2019, API flaw was detected in Nykaa Fashion’s internal systems that allowed a potential attacker to log in to any user account if the attacker had access to the user’s email ID. This could potentially put its users data at risk of being hijacked. Consequently, the company fixed the security vulnerability.

Activities

Nykaa hosts the ‘Nykaa Femina Beauty Awards’ in partnership with women’s lifestyle magazine Femina since 2015.
In 2019, Nykaa Fashion launched ‘The Power List’ in partnership with Vogue India. In October 2019, it partnered with Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif to launch the brand Kay Beauty.