Mensa Brands has attained the status of an unicorn in six months. Congratulations, how does it feel?
We are excited not just because of the valuations but because we are building an outstanding business which I am really excited about and very happy to talk about.
Hitting a valuation of $1 billion plus in just six months flat sounds unbelievable! How real is it?
Let me just tell you a little bit about what Mensa is trying to do. We are not just an aggregator, we are an accelerator of brands. Mensa means constellation. We are trying to build a constellation of stars. Each of our brands is a star. There are two parts to the business. One is creating partnerships. Our brand founders choose the right emerging brands and partner with them and invest in them. The second part is acceleration which is to grow and scale the brand. We are excited because in six months, we have been able to do 12 partnerships with 12 outstanding founders who are going to work with us across categories like fashion, beauty and home. We are able to really accelerate the growth of the brand and create breakout brands using technology, a lot of digital marketing and branding and optimising the operations of the brand.
The reason founders raised funds is because while it takes effort to build a Rs 30 crore brand, it takes a very different kind of effort to build a Rs 300-crore brand. We are trying to be a global tech-led house of brands and the categories we are focussed on are fashion, beauty and personal care and home. We are quite unique in trying to build brands out of India that can go global. We have already taken several of our brands global. They are now selling in the US, Middle East and that is quite exciting as well.
This concept of house of brands is in vogue now. It has become a buzzword. You are doing it. Falguni Nayar, the richest self made woman entrepreneur that we have in the country, is trying to make Nykaa a house of brands. The Good Glamm Group, another unicorn, wants to be a house of brands. What is going to be your differentiator?
India is mostly an unbranded market. It is going to go from unbranded to branded. 80% of lifestyle in India is unbranded and so there cannot be too many brands. The more households brands there are, the better it is because we are leading the revolution to create more branded products in India.
I do not think it is necessarily a differentiation play. Many houses of brands will be there and many of them will be profitable. I do not know about differentiation, but I will tell you our focus areas. We are very much a product and technology company with a brand focus. We are building tech systems that are very different in terms of pricing, in terms of digital marketing, in terms of back-end operations and integrations with various ecommerce platforms. We are platform neutral. We basically can go to any platform whether it is Myntra, Nykaa, Amazon, Flipkart or global platforms like Zelorra, Namshi, Target.com, Wallmart.com.
We believe that because we are building a house of brands, our brand should go everywhere, should be in every distribution channel and that is the other thing which is quite different and unique about us. We are going across fashion, beauty and personal care and home, all of which are interesting lifestyle categories.
