Ask a beauty shopper where they would buy a Charlotte Tilbury lipstick or a Rare Beauty blush, and chances are Nykaa will feature on top of the list. Ask the same shopper where they would buy a dress, and the answer is far less predictable.
For years, this gap in consumer perception has defined the challenge facing the company’s fashion marketplace, Nykaa Fashion. While the company’s beauty business became synonymous with reliable cosmetics and global brand launches, its fashion arm struggled to become the first destination consumers thought of when shopping for apparel.
But for the first time in a while, there are signs the vertical may be making progress.
’s gross merchandise value (GMV)—the value of all goods sold before discounts, returns and other adjustments—grew 30% in 2025-26 to ₹4,954 crore, while GMV in the March quarter rose 29% to ₹1,334 crore compared to the year-ago period.
The business remains far less profitable than the beauty division, but losses have narrowed sharply, offering the first meaningful evidence that management’s strategy may be gaining traction. During the quarter, Nykaa Fashion reported a positive Ebitda margin of 0.3%, its strongest profitability performance to date and a sharp improvement from roughly -10.2% a year earlier.
Ebitda is short for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
The focus on fashion is not new. When Nykaa’s parent FSN E-Commerce Ventures Limited filed for its initial public offering (IPO) in 2021, the company positioned fashion as its second major growth engine alongside beauty. At the time, Nykaa Fashion housed more than 1,400 brands and 2.8 million stock-keeping units.
The opportunity looked enormous. Citing a Redseer report in its Red Herring Prospectus, Nykaa estimated India’s online fashion market opportunity at ₹3.8 trillion, nearly three times larger than beauty and personal care, with the potential to more than double by 2025.
Yet, while its beauty arm went on to become the company’s main profit engine, fashion spent much of the next five years searching for a sustainable identity. It entered a crowded market already dominated by players such as Myntra, Reliance Retail’s Ajio, and Tata Cliq, where scale, assortment, and discounts decide customer loyalty.
Now, under chief executive Abhijeet Dabas, Nykaa Fashion is pursuing a more focused strategy. Rather than competing head-on with larger rivals, it is doubling down on premium consumers, expanding its catalogue, and forging exclusive relationships with global brands.
Whether the strategy can transform a slim profit into a sustainable business is the question likely to define Nykaa Fashion’s next chapter.
Beauty’s shadow
The comparison with Nykaa Beauty has followed Fashion since its launch in 2018.
Nykaa, founded by Falguni Nayar in 2012, rose to prominence by solving a trust problem in India’s beauty market. At a time when consumers worried about counterfeit cosmetics and unreliable sellers, the platform built its reputation on authenticity and direct brand relationships. Exclusive partnerships with global beauty labels like Rare Beauty, Fenty Beauty, and Charlotte Tilbury later helped cement its position as a category leader.
Replicating that success in fashion, however, proved far more difficult.
Beauty consumers tend to replenish products regularly and often stick to a narrower set of brands, making customer retention easier. Fashion purchases are more seasonal; trends change quickly and shoppers frequently browse multiple platforms before making a purchase. Unlike beauty, where authenticity and brand access can create a clear competitive advantage, fashion marketplaces often compete on assortment, price, and convenience.
“Nykaa’s positioning is hardwired to beauty and personal care,” said Ankur Bisen, senior partner at retail consultancy The Knowledge Company. “When consumers think of beauty, they think Nykaa. In fashion, that recall still belongs largely to Myntra.”
The numbers show the gap. In the March quarter of 2025-26, Nykaa’s beauty business generated gross merchandise value (GMV) of ₹3,892 crore, more than twice the ₹1,334 crore recorded by fashion. Over the full year, beauty contributed roughly three-fourths of the company’s overall GMV, reinforcing its position as Nykaa’s primary growth engine, according to the firm’s investor presentation.
In 2025, Flipkart led India’s online fashion market with a 25.2% share, followed by Myntra at 17.1%, Meesho at 14%, Amazon at 13.8%, and Reliance Retail’s Ajio at 9%. Nykaa Fashion accounted for just 2.3% of the market, as per estimates from Datum Intelligence, a market research firm.
The contrast with beauty is visible in Nykaa’s offline strategy as well. While Nykaa rapidly expanded physical beauty stores to over 300 across nearly 100 cities at the end of the March quarter to help consumers discover and try unfamiliar products, fashion has taken a far more selective approach.
In its early years, Nykaa Fashion experimented with a handful of multi-brand fashion stores in major cities. The pilot remained limited with fewer than 10 stores and was eventually wound down as the company concluded that fashion shoppers did not require the same offline discovery experience that beauty customers did.
According to Dabas, retail in India was built around education and discovery. Many consumers were encountering premium cosmetics brands for the first time, making physical stores a natural extension of the business. Fashion, however, did not face the same challenge.
“In beauty, it was an education-to-commerce model even before it became content-to-commerce,” Dabas told Mint during an interview. “In fashion, we don’t see the same need for multi-brand retail.”
As a result, Nykaa Fashion now stays away from building a network of multi-brand fashion stores. The company does operate offline channels for some owned brands, including lingerie label Nykd by Nykaa, but views physical retail as a brand-specific opportunity rather than a core growth strategy for the marketplace.
Dabas arrived with a front-row view of how digital consumer businesses are built. Before taking charge of Nykaa Fashion in November 2024, he led Cars24’s Southeast Asia operations and prior to that, held leadership roles at Swiggy and Singapore-based e-commerce firm Lazada. Between 2015 and 2017, he led the private brands division at Flipkart Group’s Myntra.
His view is that the comparison with beauty, while inevitable, can sometimes obscure the realities of fashion retail. “We don’t believe the right benchmark for fashion is whether it looks exactly like beauty,” Dabas said. “The role that fashion plays in a consumer’s life is very different. The way people discover, browse and buy fashion is different. Our focus is on building a fashion-first destination for a certain consumer rather than trying to replicate another playbook.”
Loyalty tests
So, how do consumers discover fashion?
Sakshi, a 23-year-old marketing professional, says she rarely limits herself to a single platform. She discovers brands on Instagram, shops wherever she finds interesting styles, and has even experimented with newer quick-commerce fashion platforms such as Slikk.
“I don’t really think about one platform first,” she said. “If I see something I like, I’ll check where it’s available and buy it.”
For younger shoppers like Sakshi, fashion discovery increasingly happens across social media and multiple apps rather than on a single marketplace.
But, shopping behaviour looks different for older consumers. Vidhi, a 34-year-old Mumbai-based architect, describes herself as a loyal customer for most everyday purchases. Nykaa Fashion enters the consideration set only for specific occasions.
“I usually go to Nykaa Fashion when I’m looking for something more curated,” she said. “I’ve used it for things like office ethnic day or wedding shopping, but I still default to Myntra for regular fashion purchases.”
Nykaa Fashion also entered the market much later than its largest rivals. Myntra started in 2007 and was acquired by Flipkart in 2014, giving the combined group more than a decade to build relationships with brands, scale logistics, and train consumers to begin their fashion shopping journeys on its platforms.
Over time, Myntra expanded into one of India’s broadest online fashion destinations, hosting brands across price points—from value and mass-market labels to premium and international names—while also building a sizeable portfolio of private labels. Frequent sale events helped reinforce consumer habits.
By the time Nykaa Fashion launched in 2018, many consumers had already developed entrenched shopping habits and platform loyalties. For context, Myntra made an operating revenue of ₹6,043 crore with a net profit of ₹548 crore, including a deferred tax credit of ₹135 crore, according to filings made with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA). The same year, Nykaa Fashion’s operating revenue was ₹674 crore against a net loss of ₹125 crore.
Finding fashion’s identity
With Nykaa Fashion’s biggest challenge being consumer perception, management believes the solution lies in giving shoppers a clearer reason to visit the platform.
For years, the business was associated primarily with women’s occasion wear. Today, Nykaa Fashion is evolving into a broader lifestyle platform spanning women’s fashion, men’s apparel, kidswear and home categories, according to Dabas.
Over the past year, the company added nearly 1,300 brands to its catalogue while expanding into newer categories. Men’s fashion emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments, growing more than 60% year-on-year, according to the company. The kids category grew more than 50% while home grew 40% year-on-year.
Customer acquisition also picked up, with the platform adding 41% more new customers in 2025-26 compared to the previous year, as it broadened its assortment and deepened engagement with premium shoppers. Annual unique transacting customers totalled 4.3 million in 2025-26 compared to 3.2 million the previous fiscal year.
Annual unique transacting customers represent the total number of unique users who place at least one order on the Nykaa Fashion platform within a 12-month period.
“We are fashion first, not price first,” Dabas said. “Our goal is to create a destination where consumers come for inspiration and brands, not just for the lowest price.”
The premium strategy marks a deliberate departure from the playbook that dominates much of Indian fashion e-commerce, where frequent sales and discount-led events remain key drivers of traffic.
“Every platform needs to play its strengths,” Dabas said. Given his experience building out Myntra’s private brands previously, Dabas is no stranger to the scale advantages mass-market platforms possess. His task in Nykaa Fashion is to prove that a different model can also work.
It also comes at a time when India’s fashion market is showing signs of premiumization. A January 2026 report by Deloitte India described “accessible premium” as one of the fastest-growing segments in fashion, driven by consumers willing to pay more for quality, design and brand experience without necessarily moving into luxury categories. Mid-premium and premium apparel segments are expected to outpace the broader market over the coming years, the report added.
The Knowledge Company’s Bisen sees logic in the strategy. “A focus on premium brands with less discounting could help Nykaa define what fashion means on its platform,” Bisen said. “At least now they are showing signs of where they are headed.”
Owned brands are another pillar of the strategy. Labels such as Nykd by Nykaa, 20Dresses, Kica, RSVP, and Gajra Gang give the company greater control over product design, pricing, and customer experience while helping it build deeper relationships with consumers.
Nykaa Fashion’s house of brands touched a GMV of ₹388 crore at the end of the March quarter, filings showed. Currently, it owns five private brands across loungewear, ethnic, sportswear and partywear categories.
A founder of an apparel brand that sells across Nykaa Fashion, Myntra, Ajio and other marketplaces said Nykaa Fashion contributes about 10% of the brand’s ₹100 crore annual sales, compared to Myntra’s 50% contribution. However, Nykaa Fashion serves a distinct purpose, one that no rival has been able to offer so far.
“Myntra gives us volume. That’s where nearly half our online sales come from. Nykaa’s contribution is much smaller, but gives us a premium brand image,” this person said, asking not to be identified. The brand’s average order value ranges between ₹1,200 – ₹1,300.
While a premium positioning may help Nykaa Fashion stand out, it does not guarantee loyalty.“Even if somebody is shopping for a ₹15,000 top, they will still compare prices across platforms,” said Bisen.
The Nike bet
The clearest expression of Nykaa Fashion’s strategy may be its recent partnership with Nike, announced in January this year.
Under the arrangement, Nykaa will operate the sportswear giant’s digital commerce business in India, including Nike’s website and app. The deal goes beyond a conventional marketplace relationship and positions Nykaa as a technology and commerce partner to one of the world’s largest apparel brands.
According to Dabas, the partnership reflects the company’s ambition to deepen its role in the fashion ecosystem rather than simply add more brands to its catalogue.
The move also mirrors a lesson from Nykaa’s beauty business, where close, exclusive relationships with global brands helped differentiate the platform from rivals. But fashion is a more crowded category, with brands typically relying on multiple channels to reach consumers.
The Knowledge Company’s Bisen sees the Nike deal as strategically important, but cautions against drawing direct comparisons with beauty.
“The difference is that Nike isn’t going to be available only on Nykaa just because the operations are managed by Nykaa,” he said. “That’s where fashion differs from beauty. Partnerships can strengthen your positioning, but they are unlikely to create exclusivity in the same way.”
Bisen also cautions against reading too much into a single quarter of profitability.
“There is a green shoot. Let’s see if it is sustainable over the next few quarters,” he said. “Ideally speaking, Nykaa should be given a few more years to prove itself. But do retail investors have that much patience with fashion?”