🇮🇳 Falguni Nayar

She was born in 1963 into a middle-class Gujarati family in Mumbai. Her father, Suresh Nayar, ran a small bearings business; her mother managed the household and her siblings' homework. She studied at New Era School, took her undergraduate degree in commerce at Sydenham College, and won admission in 1983 to the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad — the country's most competitive business school.

At IIMA she met Sanjay Nayar, the man she would marry in 1987 and who would later run KKR India. She joined the consulting firm A.F. Ferguson and Co. after graduation and then, in 1993, Kotak Mahindra Finance, where she rose through institutional equities, investment banking, and the international subsidiary, eventually heading the firm's London office and serving as a board member of Kotak group entities. She was, by 2010, one of the highest-ranking women in Indian finance.

The idea for Nykaa came on a holiday. She had been observing the rise of Sephora-style multi-brand beauty retail in Europe and the United States and the simultaneous near-absence of organised beauty retail in India. Indian women, she noticed, bought their lipsticks either from neighbourhood chemists with no advice or from grey-market sellers on eBay. There was no Indian Sephora. She decided to build one. She filed Nykaa's incorporation papers in 2012 and launched the website in 2013. She was forty-nine.

The early years were patient. She used her own savings and recruited a small team, including her IIM-A daughter Adwaita and son Anchit. Nykaa stocked authentic international brands at a time when Indian e-commerce was a wilderness of fakes. She insisted on physical stores from 2014, against the prevailing wisdom that beauty would be a pure-play digital category. The stores became Nykaa Luxe, Nykaa On Trend, and Nykaa Beauty Kiosks, and they validated the brand in a way no amount of online advertising could.

The company expanded into private label (Nykaa Cosmetics, Nykaa Naturals), into fashion (Nykaa Fashion, 2018), into men's grooming (Nykaa Man), and into content (Nykaa TV, Beauty Book). By 2020 it was profitable — almost unheard-of for an Indian consumer-internet company at scale. The pandemic, far from breaking the business, accelerated it: locked-down customers bought lipstick they would not wear for months, just to feel like themselves.

The IPO of November 2021 was oversubscribed many times over. The stock listed at a strong premium on day one and elevated Nayar's family to a paper net worth in the multi-billion-dollar range. The image of her ringing the listing bell, flanked by Adwaita and Anchit, became the defining photograph of Indian entrepreneurial possibility for a generation of women who had been told their thirties were their entrepreneurial last chance.

The stock has since corrected sharply, as is the way with internet IPOs, and analysts have debated quarterly the cost of Nykaa's expansion into fashion. Nayar herself has remained unhurried. She has said, in interviews, that she is building for the next twenty years and not the next two quarters. She has also faced criticism over a bonus-share issuance in late 2022 that drew scrutiny from retail holders; she has answered that the company is run by its founders for its long-term shareholders.

She was awarded the Padma Shri in January 2024. She remains the executive chair and managing director of Nykaa. Her son Anchit runs the men's grooming business; her daughter Adwaita runs the fashion arm. The Nayar family is one of very few in Indian business in which a mother and her two children are simultaneously executive leaders of a publicly listed company. Forty years ago Falguni Nayar walked into IIMA as one of a handful of women in her cohort. In November 2021 she walked out of the BSE having rung a bell no Indian woman had rung before her.