Minimalist Became a ₹2,955 Crore Skincare Brand While Most of Its Customers Checked Out on Amazon and Nykaa — Because Its Own Store Was Doing a Different Job

In October 2020, two brothers in Jaipur filled 750 bottles of skincare by hand, weighed each one on a scale, and put them up for sale across five products. They had done no marketing. The batch was meant to last a few months; it shipped out to India's eight largest cities within one. Four years later, Hindustan Unilever agreed to buy 90.5% of the company at a pre-money enterprise valuation of ₹2,955 crore. Minimalist is usually filed under "D2C success story," and on most measures it is one. But the detail that makes it worth studying is the one that doesn't fit the label: for most of its life, only a small share of Minimalist's sales went through its own website. The founders knew this, said so publicly, and built the brand anyway.

The failed startup that set up the successful one

Mohit and Rahul Yadav were not first-time founders. Their first company, an e-commerce venture from the pre-smartphone era, was followed by years on the core team at CarDekho. In 2018 they started Freewill, a personalised haircare brand that mixed formulations to each customer's profile. It joined the second cohort of Surge, Sequoia India's accelerator (now Peak XV), and by Mohit's account on the Blume Ventures podcast it reached roughly ₹12–15 crore in annual run rate, profitably.

Then they hit a wall that had nothing to do with demand. Under Indian rules, combining two active ingredients into a new solution counts as manufacturing, which can only happen in a licensed industrial facility. Freewill's model, mixing to order, sat on the wrong side of that line. Lawyers told them nobody would notice while they were small. The brothers decided that a business which could be shut down the moment it got big enough to matter was not worth scaling. That decision, plus everything Freewill taught them about what Indian customers wanted from personal care, became Minimalist. Rahul's chemistry background shaped the formulations; the leftover Surge funding paid for the first batch.

Transparency as the product, not the tagline

Indian skincare in 2020 was dominated by "natural," "chemical-free" and "ayurvedic" claims. Minimalist went the other way, closer to what The Ordinary had done internationally: name the active ingredient on the front of the pack, print its concentration, say who supplied it, and publish the clinical results. Inc42 reported that the brand sources actives from global suppliers such as BASF, Croda and Seppic, and that clinical trial results sit on each product page. Mint describes labels carrying everything from ingredient percentages to supplier names. The brand's campaign line, #HideNothing, is a description of the label more than a slogan.

This had a cost. Forbes India reported that the founders held cost of goods at around 30% of the selling price, against roughly 20% as a common benchmark in consumer products. Spending more on ingredients meant there was less margin to spend on acquiring customers, which forced the next decision.

A marketing budget at half the category norm

"Most brands spend 40–50% on marketing while we spend around 25%. That's where most ventures bleed," Mohit told Inc42. The early months ran on almost nothing but word of mouth. On the Blume podcast he described replying personally to every customer question for the first two months, and receiving messages from customers saying they trusted the brand precisely because it wasn't paying influencers. The founders took that as a signal and decided against influencer content in that early phase.

The discipline wasn't anti-marketing. Spend started around 30% of revenue, fell to 20–22% as performance marketing on Meta and Google became more efficient, and later rose back to about 28% as the brand put more into awareness, according to Mohit's own breakdown. What stayed constant was the ratio between the two halves of the business: a product that cost more to make than its rivals, and acquisition that cost meaningfully less. When the product does part of the selling, through labels people screenshot and share, the paid side has less work to do.

The uncomfortable channel maths

Minimalist launched on its own website, then listed on Amazon and Nykaa within its first few months. "We saw 8x growth in no time on marketplaces when we listed," Mohit told The Core. "Due to that, our direct channels did not perform as well compared to marketplaces." When the business first crossed ₹100 crore in run rate, he put the direct share at around 40%, with Amazon and Nykaa supplying the rest. By 2022 that direct share had fallen to about 10%. Later it recovered to around 20%; Indian Retailer reported FY23 GMV of ₹178 crore with 20% coming from the website and apps.

For a brand that is held up as a D2C benchmark, that is a striking split. Most founders reading those numbers would see a problem: marketplace commissions, no ownership of the customer, and a brand page that looks like every other brand page. Minimalist's founders saw it differently, and the reason is in how they described their website.

The website as a reference library that sells somewhere else

"Most visitors to our website may end up buying from marketplaces due to personal preferences or after-sales experiences," Mohit told Inc42. "Our site is no doubt a sales tool, but we consider it more of a communication channel." He described the site as the brand's top channel for customer acquisition anyway, because it is where people come to ask questions, compare actives and work out which product suits their skin.

That is a coherent strategy if you accept how Indian shoppers actually buy beauty products. Plenty of them already have an Amazon or Nykaa account, saved addresses, a payment method they trust, and a return policy they understand. Asking them to create a new account on a brand site to save the brand a commission is asking them to take on friction for your benefit. Minimalist let the site win the research and let the marketplace win the checkout. The ingredient pages, the concentration charts and the clinical results did the persuading regardless of where the order landed.

The storefront that does this job runs on Shopify. A check of beminimalist.co in October 2026 shows a Shopify store with GoKwik handling checkout, the one-click, COD-friendly checkout layer common among Indian D2C brands. That pairing says a lot about priorities: a standard, maintainable commerce platform for the catalogue and content, with checkout tuned for Indian payment habits rather than custom-built.

Where the direct channel actually converts: the app

If the mobile website was the research desk, the app became the place where loyal customers came back to buy. According to a case study published by Appbrew, the mobile app platform Minimalist moved to, the app converted at twice the rate of the mobile website, and its share of direct sales rose from under 5% to 30–40%, with average sessions running past eight minutes. That is a vendor's own write-up and should be read as such, but the pattern is consistent with the rest of the story. First-time buyers often went to a marketplace. Repeat buyers, who already trusted the brand and knew what they wanted, had a reason to come back to Minimalist directly.

This is the part most "be more D2C" advice misses. The direct channel doesn't have to win the first order to be valuable. It has to be the best place to learn about the product, and the easiest place to reorder it.

What Hindustan Unilever actually paid for

The deal announced on 22 January 2025 gave HUL 90.5% of Uprising Science, Minimalist's parent company, for ₹2,670 crore in cash plus a ₹45 crore primary infusion, at a pre-money enterprise valuation of ₹2,955 crore, with the remaining 9.5% to follow within two years. The founders stayed on to run the business. The Competition Commission of India cleared the deal a few months later. Entrackr described it as one of the largest D2C transactions in India in recent years.

HUL did not need Minimalist's website traffic or its marketplace accounts; it has more distribution than any startup could build. What it said it wanted, in its own announcement and in the plans MediaNama summarised, was a sharply positioned, digital-first brand in the fast-growing "masstige" segment, with room to scale past ₹1,000 crore through HUL's offline reach, supply chain and international presence. It also cited something it described as unmonetised: learning how to build digital-first brands. Notably, Unilever Ventures had already invested in Minimalist's ₹110 crore Series A in 2021, led by Peak XV, so the acquirer had held a stake in the business for more than three years before buying it.

Strip that down and the asset was trust. A label consumers believed, a customer base that looked for the brand by name even on Amazon and Nykaa, and a margin structure that hadn't been distorted by years of expensive acquisition.

The parts that don't fit the clean story

The first full year under HUL was not tidy. FY25 revenue grew 48% to ₹514.8 crore, but the company reported a net loss of ₹31.5 crore after ₹46.1 crore of exceptional items that weren't detailed in the filings. Before those items, it made a profit of ₹13.6 crore, down from ₹17.9 crore the year before, and EBITDA margin was thin at around 3.5%. Other expenses, the line that carries marketing, logistics and marketplace commissions, rose to ₹313.3 crore from ₹206.4 crore.

The marketing ratio also drifted. The 25% figure that made Minimalist famous was an early-stage number; the founders themselves put combined spend nearer 28% as the brand shifted towards awareness. And the channel mix carries a real dependency: a brand that sells most of its volume through two or three marketplaces is exposed to their fee changes, ranking rules and private-label ambitions in a way a brand with a strong direct channel isn't. None of this undoes the outcome. It just means the lesson isn't "spend 25% and you'll get acquired."

What Shopify brands in India can take from Minimalist

Decide what your own store is for. If most of your category buys on marketplaces, your site may be more valuable as the place where people research and get convinced than as the place where every order closes. Build it for that: detailed ingredient or material pages, comparison content, routines and guides, clinical or test results, honest answers to the questions people actually ask. Measure it on assisted demand and brand search, not just its own conversion rate.

Make the product page carry proof, not adjectives. Minimalist's pages work because they publish things a competitor can't fake: concentrations, sources, test results. Every category has an equivalent. For apparel it might be fabric weight and wash-test photos; for furniture, material specs and construction details; for food, lab reports. Shopify metafields make this kind of structured information straightforward to add at catalogue scale.

Give repeat buyers a reason to come direct. The direct channel's real win at Minimalist was the returning customer, through the app. For most brands that doesn't require an app on day one. Fast reorder, saved routines, subscriptions, loyalty points and a checkout that handles UPI and COD well will do much of the same work on a Shopify store.

Treat marketplace sales as brand-building, not leakage. Minimalist grew 8x after listing on marketplaces and kept building its brand anyway. The question is not whether to sell on Amazon and Nykaa but whether your brand is strong enough that customers search for it by name when they get there.

Hold the cost structure that funds the positioning. Higher cost of goods and lower acquisition cost only work together. If your product is what you want people to talk about, it has to be worth talking about, and the margin to make it so has to come from somewhere other than the ingredient list.