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.