10 things to know about Nykaa founder Falguni Nayar, India’s wealthiest self-made female billionaire

As Nykaa made its debut in the stock market on Wednesday, it took no time for Nykaa owner Falguni Nayar to join the league of the world’s richest as the 58-year-old is now India’s wealthiest self-made female billionaire and the second wealthiest woman after Savitri Jindal, the chairperson of OP Jindal group, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Here are 10 things to know about Falguni Nayar

1. A Gujarati, born and brought up in Mumbai, Falguni Nayar was raised in a business environment. Her father ran a small bearings company where her mother used to help and words like investments, stock market, trade were very familiar to Falguni.

2. Falguni went to the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and straight after obtaining her management degree, she started her career as a management consultant with AF Ferguson and Co. Falguni Nayar’s husband Sanjay Nayar, whom she met at the business school, is India chairman of KKR & Co.

3. In 1993, Falguni joined the Kotak Mahindra Group and spent 19 years in various roles.

4. From 2005 to 2012, she was the managing director of Kotak Mahindra.

5. As she has said in many interviews, she was happy in Kotak Mahindra and it was very difficult for her to quit the job and start something on her own as “everything was going right” in Kotak.

6. However, Falguni had a “self-imposed deadline” that she has to give entrepreneurship a try by the time she is 50. And thus Nykaa was born in 2012 as Falguni exited from Kotak. At that time, her children (twin Anchit and Adwaita) left to study in the US and she had the time she needed to focus on her entrepreneurship project.

7. In 2012, Nykaa started with 60 daily orders and never thought of cutting prices. “We’d rather sell the right colour of lipstick at full price, than the wrong shade at half off which would make the buyer unhappy within minutes of wearing,” Nayar told Bloomberg.

8. Now, Nykaa is a full-grown family business with Falguni’s son Anchit, a graduate from Columbia University, running the beauty e-commerce business, and daughter Adwaita, with an MBA from Harvard Business School, heading the fashion vertical.

9. Falguni Nayar is now richer than the Muthoot family of the Muthoot Finance, Marico founder and Chairman Harsh Mariwala, Asian Paints’ Abhay Vakil, according to Forbes India Rich List.

10. As disclosed by Falguni in her earlier interviews, she does not believe naysayers and believes in never giving up.