Six top-level executives have quit Nykaa since April; Falguni Nayar to take on CMO role

Nykaa

Six senior executives have quit Nykaa since April, the company said in a statement on August 2. The company's chief marketing officer, Shalini Raghavan, is among the top-level staff that is departing from the beauty platform.

These exits come after five senior executives, including Nykaa SuperStore CEO Vikas Gupta, chief business officer Gopal Asthana, and chief commercial officer, Manoj Gandhi, had resigned from the company just in March.

Joining the trio in the same month was the business head, Shuchi Pandya and finance head Lalit Pruthi. While Gupta had joined VLCC as CEO, Asthana jumped to Tata Cliq as the CEO of the e-commerce platform, months after departing from the Falguni Nayar-led company which is facing competition from Reliance, Tata and several other players.

Reliance is setting up Tira to take on new-age players in the beauty and personal care space while Tata is ramping up its e-commerce offerings under Tata Cliq and is roping in experienced people to lead its efforts. With deep pockets, large traditional players have been able to attract talent from companies like Nykaa.

"....Given the criticality of the marketing function to One Nykaa, Founder and CEO, Falguni Nayar will guide the function directly," the company said in a statement.

"As announced in April, marketing leadership at Nykaa has been strengthened over the last year across performance marketing, customer lifecycle management and content charters," it added.

Kingshuk Basu, senior vice president (VP) for retail, Sumant Kasliwal, senior VP at the fashion unit; Aditya Sandhu from the business-to-business sales unit, VP Sachin Kataria from the e-commerce business and Shantanu Prakash, VP for marketing and communications are among the others who have now quit Nykaa along with Raghavan, Reuters reported on August 2.

Just as these departures come to be known, Nykaa said it had made new appointments but did not shed light on why the senior management was quitting in large numbers.

"As Nykaa evolves into a multi-dimensional, multi-geographic business, leadership roles are being augmented with an eye on strategic realignment, cost rationalization and growing complexity of the business," Nykaa added in its statement to Moneycontrol.

In line with those plans, the company said it had elevated Shailendra Singh as Business Head for Physical Retail- Beauty and will continue to lead omnichannel initiatives. Singh joined Nykaa around 18 months ago from FMCG giant HUL. The company also said Rozita Nouruzi is now be the CEO of Nysaa, its omnichannel beauty business and will lead operations in the GCC region.

The departures also come at a time when FSN E-Commerce Ventures, the operator of beauty and personal care startup Nykaa, saw its profits decline by over 70 percent year-on-year (YoY) in Q4FY23 to Rs 2.3 crore on the back of price pressures. During the same period, its revenue from operations had however jumped around 34 percent to Rs 1,301.7 crore from Rs 973.3 crore.

Nykaa is due to announce its Q1FY23 results on August 11. FSN E-Commerce Ventures' share price had ended down 0.57 percent on August 2 to trade at Rs 147 apiece on the BSE.