Anchit Nayar, Building the Store Network Behind Nykaa's Beauty Business
The unglamorous job of turning an imported brand promise into working stores, pricing and supply chains.
Every global beauty brand that wants to sell in India eventually needs the same unglamorous thing: someone who can turn a licensing conversation into actual shelf space, correct pricing, working warehouses and a store that does not embarrass the brand. Anchit Nayar's job at Nykaa has been exactly that kind of translation work, taking labels like Huda Beauty, Charlotte Tilbury and Kiehl's and making them into something an Indian shopper can trust, touch and buy correctly. It is a less visible brand-building skill than founding a company or designing a campaign, but it is the one that decides whether an imported brand promise actually survives contact with a new market.
Seven years at Morgan Stanley before the beauty aisle
Nayar is the son of Nykaa founder Falguni Nayar and the twin brother of Adwaita Nayar, who runs Nykaa Fashion. Before any of that mattered professionally, he built a conventional finance career of his own: a degree from Columbia University followed by close to seven years at Morgan Stanley in New York, working across media and telecom banking, high-yield debt and equities. He moved back to India around 2018 to join Nykaa, at a point when the company was still primarily known as a beauty website rather than a retailer with a physical footprint.
The job: beauty e-commerce and brand partnerships
Nayar's actual title is Executive Director of Nykaa's parent, FSN E-Commerce Ventures, and Chief Executive Officer of its beauty e-commerce business, a role distinct from his sister's fashion mandate. The part of that job he is most specifically credited for is brand acquisition and management: signing international names to sell in India, then handling the imports, pricing, warehousing and marketing that let a foreign brand operate here at all. Nykaa's exclusive distribution deal for Kiehl's, run in partnership with L'Oreal Luxe across D2C, standalone stores and its own marketplace, is the clearest recent example of that model working end to end.
Building the offline half of an online business
The part of Nykaa's story that is most concretely his is the store network. Nykaa opened its physical retail arm in 2019, and under Nayar it expanded fast, from roughly twenty stores to well over 200 across two formats: Nykaa Luxe for premium international brands, and Nykaa On Trend for a broader catalogue, plus a newer fragrance-focused format, Nykaa Perfumery. He has also pushed two initiatives aimed at customers a pure beauty website was never going to reach on its own: Nykaa Man, a men's grooming platform, and Superstore, a business-to-business arm that lets small retailers order beauty stock online at wholesale prices instead of juggling multiple distributors. In interviews he has pointed to one customer behavior as the payoff: a large share of shoppers now use stores and the app together, browsing in person and reordering online.
Physical retail does not fit an e-commerce brand's economics as neatly as a homepage banner does, which is exactly why building it honestly, store by store, is a better test of a brand's staying power than another funding round.
The part that is genuinely harder
This is also the harder, less flattering half of the story. Store networks are capital intensive and slow in a way that app downloads are not, and Nykaa's public store counts have moved unevenly across different years of reporting, a sign of a business still finding its shape. Quick-commerce apps now deliver everyday beauty basics faster than any store visit, and rivals like Reliance's Tira have entered premium beauty retail with comparable ambitions and deeper pockets. None of that is a personal failing of Nayar's, but it is the honest context: the offline network he is credited with building has to keep proving its economics in a more crowded market, not just take credit for opening more doors.
What the import job actually teaches
Nayar's contribution to Nykaa is less romantic than a founding story and less publicly documented than his mother's or sister's, but it points at something real about brand building: a promise made in a boardroom, that this label will be available and genuine here, is worthless until someone does the tedious work of customs paperwork, warehouse contracts and store fit-outs that make it true. That is the job Nayar has actually held at Nykaa, and it is worth naming precisely rather than folding into the more famous story around him.