Ananth Narayanan

House of brands

Scaled Myntra to over $1.5B, then set out to build Indian consumer brands more capital-efficiently.

Ananth Narayanan is one of the clearest operator-voices on how Indian consumer brands actually scale. He spent fifteen years at McKinsey, led Myntra through its steepest growth years, ran the e-pharmacy Medlife, and now builds a house of brands at Mensa.

What they built

At Myntra he took sales from roughly $250 million to over $1.5 billion while making private brands the most profitable part of the Flipkart ecosystem. At Mensa he acquires half-built brands and scales them with shared technology, sourcing and marketing, betting that the constraints that shaped Unilever and P&G no longer apply.

Why it matters for India

His four-stage model of scaling, product first, then performance marketing, then offline, is the most practical public framework for Indian consumer founders, and he is unusually candid about the numbers behind it.