Ananth Narayanan, Who Buys Brands Instead Of Building Them
The usual founder story starts with an idea and looks for customers. This one starts with brands that already have customers and looks for what they are missing, which is almost always the same list.
Ananth Narayanan spent fifteen years at McKinsey, was chief executive of Myntra, where he oversaw the integration of Jabong, and then co-founded and led Medlife before its merger into PharmEasy. In 2021 he founded Mensa Brands, since renamed BRND.ME, to acquire and scale Indian consumer brands.
What a small Indian brand usually lacks
Not demand. A brand that sells well on a marketplace has already proved the product and the proposition. What it lacks is working capital, supply-chain depth, media buying at a serious scale and the ability to move into new channels.
Those four are boring, expensive and identical across categories, which is precisely what makes them a business rather than a favour.
Why the model is a branding argument
It assumes that brand equity accumulates in many small places rather than in a few large ones, which is a genuinely different reading of the Indian consumer market from the one that built the old FMCG giants.
A house of forty small brands is a bet that specificity beats scale in a market where an audience can now find exactly what it wants.
The old model built one brand for everyone. This one assumes a hundred audiences that would rather have their own.
Where the thesis gets tested
In whether centralised capability actually transfers. Media buying and logistics do. Taste, tone and the founder's obsessive attention to a niche frequently do not, and a brand that loses that becomes a generic product with a familiar logo.
The operator's advantage
Narayanan's background is unusual in Indian consumer entrepreneurship: consulting, then a marketplace, then a health platform, then a portfolio. That is a career spent on the plumbing rather than on the storytelling.
What it means for the rest of the industry
It creates an exit for the small Indian brand that was previously stuck between being profitable and being fundable, and it changes what an agency is pitching to. The client may now be a portfolio, with one media contract and forty brand voices to keep separate.