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Bengaluru, March 7 House of brands, Mensa is now looking to acquire bigger brands with revenues in the range of ₹50 crore to ₹200 crore, Ananth Narayanan, CEO of India’s fastest growing unicorn told businessline.
The company had raised a ₹300 crore debt round from TradeCred last month. Mensa Group recorded ₹310 crore revenue in FY22 and in the case of Mensa India, the revenue stood at ₹160 crore in FY22 and the company posted a loss of ₹19 crore in EBITDA, according to MCA filings.
Expanding portfolio
In terms of sectors, Mensa continues to be focused on fashion, beauty and home decor. However, it will look at filling gap in the current portfolio by adding western wear and footwear brands under fashion and colour cosmetics, and scientific beauty under beauty, among other spaces. Narayanan also highlighted that two of Mensa’s brands Pebble and Dennis Lingo have achieved EBITDA profitability along with growing at the rate of 2x and 6x respectively, post acquisition.
Talking about the levers that helped Mensa scale these brands, Narayanan said, “We partnered with Dennis Lingo about 18 months ago and it has grown 6x since then. To achieve thai, we increased their product range from only plain shirts to checked shirts and other products. Second, we increased their distribution from primarily being sold on Amazon and Flipkart to partnering deeply with the likes of Ajio, Myntra and others.”
Tech-led growth
“Third, we have also done what’s called tech-led growth hacking. Like in a retail environment, shelf-space matters. In an online environment, the first six swipes matter. How do you get your products in the first six swipes organically. Which means understanding what each of the platforms value and working deeply with them. The fourth is brand building, wherein we setup a D2C (direct to consumer) website for Dennis Lingo and boosted their social media following, among other things,” he added.
Going ahead, Narayanan plans to take the brand global and have already started selling a bit in the Middle East, and the US. He expects the brand to become a ₹1,000 crores brand in five years time.
Mensa Brands was launched in April 2021 and has acquired 25 brands till date. In November 2021, Mensa became the fastest Indian start-up to achieve a unicorn (valuation of over $1 billion) valuation.
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