Minimalist - the ₹360 Cr. skincare D2C💄
The story of how it scaled to ₹100 Crores in 8 months.
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Lets go to the Minimalist story ✨
Minimalist makes over ₹360 crores in revenue and has disrupted India's beauty industry in just four years. A category-creating-profitable D2C company that is shaking up India's ₹16,000 crore skincare market while expanding into other beauty and personal care categories. Let’s dive—
But first, what’s cooking in this space?
See, skincare is just a small part of India’s massive $20B beauty and personal care (BPC) market — expected to touch $30B by 2030. India also has the fastest expected growth at 10% among all countries. BPC has 10 categories — the top 3 being Bath, Hair, and SkinCare. Minimalist went after skincare as it was already big. Founders Mohit and Rahul Yadav, being tenured startup folks who spotted a clear whitespace of “active ingredients”.
What did Minimalist crack?
Category creation insight.
Minimalist identified a shift in India— rising disposable incomes and a growing need for serious skincare over gimmicky claims of Ayurveda, natural products, and fairness. Fun fact: India’s middle class is expected to go up to 47% by 2030.
They targeted active ingredients—specific chemicals that address skin issues like wrinkles, dryness, and smoothness. These are common in all skincare but were not sold separately and were unknown to most desi users. This need gained traction in the West with the brand "The Ordinary," which brought education & transparency in chemical skincare. Minimalist became the "The Ordinary" that the Indian users needed.
Cracking trust with capex calls.
In the last few years, brands like Foxtale, Deconstruct, Pilgrim, Skin Inspired, and The Derma Co by Mama Earth have popped up. Even the Western giant “The Ordinary” has entered India. The game is intensifying but Minimalist still has a repeat rate of 60%. How? Well, because, unlike many other players, they have taken a high capex call of bringing production in-house and not using third-party manufacturers. The idea is simple:
→ Be transparent over being being fancy
→ Get loyal customers to do word of mouth
→ Invest in the product & sacrifice some margins
→ Spend less on marketing (40% vs 25% norm)
Nailing access to users.
Minimalist made its products affordable – current best-selling products range from ₹200 to 600. The idea is simple: go for the masses → offer the highest value for money → scale fast. That’s why ~50% of customers come from Tier 2 cities.
Also, the company is so confident in the product that they are now going for International markets for their 0 to 1 journey — already present in the UK, USA, Gulf countries, South East Asian countries, and more.
That’s all for now. We launched a new episode of GrowthX Wireframe, where we cover Minimalist in-depth in a 12 min episode.
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