Daybreak - Nykaa cracked fashion at last. Myntra sees no reason to panic

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

After years of struggling to grow, Nykaa Fashion has finally found its footing. The past year brought a real resurgence. For a long time, the platform bet on building its own private-label brands, even pushing hard into ethnic wear. It leaned on discounts and backed small, up-and-coming labels. None of it delivered the growth it was chasing. So Nykaa Fashion changed course. That new strategy is at last starting to show results. What turned it around, and how long can it last? Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Picture the screen of a senior executive at Mentra, India's biggest online fashion retailer. There is an Excel sheet open tracking the rivals that Mentra watches most closely. Flip-card fashion, Amazon fashion, Reliance as Agio, Misho, but there is one name missing. Nike Fashion. To find it, you have to open a drop-down menu, click on the word others, and then look for it. For years, this is exactly where Nike Fashion has sat in the industry's mind. You probably know Nica as a beauty company. It is the place that millions of Indians go to buy lipstick, skin care, perfume, and it has built an empire doing it.

What fewer people talk about is that Nica also runs a fashion business. And for most of its life, that fashion arm has been the overlooked sibling. And that is beginning to change now. In the last financial year, Nica fashion sold nearly 5,000 crore rupees worth of clothing and accessories. which is a jump of 30% from the year before. And this figure, the total value of everything sold on the platform, is what the industry calls gross merchandise value or GMV. In fact, in the three months to June,

the fashion arm did something that it had never managed to do before. It actually made money. A small profit, but a profit still. Around the same time, NICO's share price climbed to its highest level in more than three years. and investors pointed to the fashion turnaround as one of the reasons why. Now, here is what makes this interesting. Nike Fashion did fix itself by refusing to play the game the way that the rivals do, which meant no price wars or race to be the biggest.

But the same choices have also kept it small. The biggest global brands which are arriving in India now are still walking straight past Nike fashion. So how did Nica's over? looked fashion arm finally start winning and why even now does so much of the industry still not take it seriously. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host Nickar Sharma and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargis and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 8th of September. Years, Nike fashion had an identity problem. It ran a clothing business,

but it used the playbook that it had built for makeup. And that meant going light on discounts and leaning hard on slick videos and content instead. It wanted to look premium and in some way it genuinely was. The average Nike fashion shopper spent around $4,500 per order. On Mintra and AdGio for comparison, that same number sits closer to $1,500 to $2,500. So people were spending more per order on NICA. Now, the trouble is that a premium price tag needs premium brands behind it. And those were exactly what Nike fashion did not have.

Its early efforts went into curating smaller emerging designers and a scatter of digital first names that most shoppers had never heard of. A mass market staple, for example, like HNM, was not even on the platform until this year, partly because H&M had an exclusive deal with Mintra until 2023. So, NICA charged premium prices, without the premium brands to justify them. To the larger labels, it was a place to dump leftover stock,

a kind of a liquidation platform. In the industry's own words to my colleague, the Ken reporter Noha Bubei, it was the industry's fourth platform, listed on after the ones that mattered. And then the strategy changed, and the change was quite blunt. The management decided it would simply not fight the discount war at all.

Instead, it doubled down on, being premium and went after brands that shoppers already wanted and pushed into categories where the price battles were less brutal. It offered third-party brands a friendlier cut of the sales. And it also cleaned house on its own in-house labels, shutting down some offline operations and swallowing losses to get healthier. And it also tightened the screws on shoppers themselves, adding a flat $29-p platform fee and penalizing people who return orders too often. And it worked. Nike Fashion now carries more than 1,500 outside brands, adding over 130 in a single quarter, including Birkenstock and H&M's active wear line. H&M, in fact, became its number one brand

almost overnight. Men's wear grew 83% in a year, and the cost of winning each new customer fell by nearly a third. All of this goes on to make the next fact about Nike fashion even more. striking. More on that in the next segment. Nike fashion still cannot attract the brands that matter the most right now, which is the wave of global labels pouring into India. Recently, more than 30 international brands enter the Indian market. Almost all of them chose to list with Mintra or Reliance. In August, a reliance company signed an exclusive deal to bring in skims, the shapeware label co-founded by Kim Kardashian. Mintra alone has added more than 40 international brands this year,

and Reliance carries over 90 global luxury names. Nica was largely left out of all of this. So why do these brands walk past a platform that just turned profitable? Because Mintra and Reliance offer something that Nica cannot yet match. Call it full service. They will run a brand's online store, manage its supply chain, handle its marketing and its deliveries, and also hand it instant access to a huge ready-made customer base.

For a foreign brand lining in India, that means it barely has to lift a finger to reach millions of people. Naika does not have that machinery in fashion. It leans instead on its beauty shoppers wandering over to buy clothes and clothing is a fickle, trend-driven business that Mintra chases far more aggressively. Nike's answer to all of this is a deal with Nike. And it is an unusual one. Nike will list on Nike fashion like any other brand.

But Nike will also run Nike's own India website and app from end to end, handling everything from orders to marketing to customer experience. So when someone buys directly from a brand's own store like that, the industry calls it D2C or direct to consumer. and every rupee spent on Nike's Indian store now counts as Nike Fashion's business. It is Nike trying to prove that it can do for a clothing brand what it spent years perfecting for beauty. Nike's founder has said that fashion will be central to the company's next five years.

But for now, the heart truth sits back on that Excel sheet. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Snitha Sharma, and edited by Rajiv CN.