Acquisitions, new categories and the house of brands
Varun Alagh has bought growth as well as built it, and the pattern of the deals is consistent. BBlunt, acquired for about Rs 135 crore in February 2022, brought salon hair care and professional credibility [10]. Dr Sheth's brought a dermatology led skincare brand. More recently the company has moved into categories that sit outside beauty altogether. It acquired BTM Ventures, the owner of the men's grooming brand Reginald Men, for about Rs 195 crore, and took a minority stake in Fang Oral Care [3].
The newer bets are deliberately small and option-like. Honasa launched Luminve to enter prestige skincare, and it entered fragrance with FIKN, which the company described as India's first elixir brand aimed at a large and underpenetrated category [3] [4]. Rather than build a fragrance brand from scratch at scale, the company buys or seeds a position, tests it with its own distribution, and decides later whether to push it.
He has described the priority for the portfolio as putting the younger brands at the centre of growth while Mamaearth remains the cash engine. In the June quarter of FY27, the younger brands grew more than 40 per cent, BTM Ventures crossed a Rs 150 crore annual run rate and had more than doubled since the acquisition, and The Derma Co reached a net sales value run rate of Rs 1,000 crore, which the company said made it the only Indian fast moving consumer goods player to build two Rs 1,000 crore brands in ten years [4].
The strategic logic he articulates is about how Indian consumers shop rather than about how brands are built. In the annual report message he and Ghazal Alagh wrote that discovery has moved to mobile phones, where beauty is found and debated through creators rather than told through mass media, that the path to purchase has fragmented across e commerce, quick commerce and general trade so a brand must win everywhere at once, and that the youngest consumers are setting the pace [5]. That is a description of a market where a single brand cannot cover the ground, which is the argument for a portfolio.
The company's own framing of scale is explicit: Honasa wants to be the fastest growing company in Indian fast moving consumer goods to reach the Rs 5,000 crore revenue mark, and to get to Rs 5,550 crore with a 15 per cent EBITDA margin by FY31 [5]. Brokerages have responded with a range of views rather than a single one, with SBI Securities publishing a buy rating and a target price of Rs 475 a share in mid 2026, seeing the company as a long term consumer play on premiumisation [7].
