Case Studies
Editorial case studies of women-led Indian companies whose founder stories are not on this site — analytical reads of the public record, not press releases.
A mother who couldn’t find products she trusted for her own daughters built one of India’s best-known toxin-free mom-and-baby care brands, then sold it in the country’s largest D2C exit of 2021. A case study of positioning, content-to-commerce, and what happens to a brand after the founders cash out.
A women-only social network is a strange thing to build in a country where most digital businesses chase the largest addressable market they can find. SHEROES did the opposite, and its business model is a study in monetising trust rather than attention.
Aditi Gupta turned a design-school thesis about a subject nobody wanted to discuss into a self-funding company built on a comic book. This is how the Menstrupedia model works, what it earns, and where the numbers get fuzzy.
Zivame did not invent the bra. It rebuilt the way Indian women buy one, privately and by size and with guidance, and in doing so wrote one of the earliest D2C playbooks the country had seen. Here is how the model worked, what it cost, and why it ended up inside Reliance.
Falguni Nayar left a career in investment banking to start Nykaa in 2012, at an age when most founders have long stopped. This is the playbook behind it: a content-plus-commerce model, an inventory-led bet on authenticity, a house of private-label brands, physical stores, and a November 2021 IPO that made her one of India’s richest self-made women.
How Mira Kulkarni built a premium Ayurveda brand from a small Delhi garage in 2000 into a luxury Ayurveda house with manufacturing in the Himalayan foothills at Lodsi, the brand-building patience, the manufacturing choices, and the long arc of the Estée Lauder relationship that began with a minority stake in 2008 and progressed, in March 2026, to an agreement for full ownership.
Founded in 1959 with ₹80 in borrowed capital, Lijjat is now a women-only co-operative with tens of thousands of co-owners across India. A long-form case study of the structure, the operating model, and the things the rest of Indian D2C still hasn’t learned from it.
An Oxford-trained Rhodes Scholar and a Cambridge-trained economist built a millet-led, additive-free food brand for Indian children in a market that had mostly ignored the category. A long-form case study of category creation, product discipline, and the choice not to compete with Nestlé on its own terms.
