Business Case - Minimalist: India’s Biggest D2C Beauty Exit
A Business Case Study on India’s Most Extraordinary Skincare Story
In early 2025, Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) announced one of the most consequential acquisitions in India’s consumer-brand history — it would acquire Minimalist for ₹3,000 crore, marking the country’s largest all-cash D2C exit ever.
Minimalist was not built in a metro.
It had no celebrity endorsements.
It had no glamorous brand story.
It was launched in the middle of the pandemic with one product and a single Instagram post.
Yet, in just four years, Minimalist grew from an unknown experiment to the fastest-growing Indian skincare powerhouse, challenging legacy behemoths like HUL, P&G, and L’Oréal — and ultimately being bought by one of them.
This is the remarkable story of how two brothers from Jaipur built a ₹3,000-crore brand by betting on science, transparency, and a radically different approach to beauty.
The Origin
The Minimalist story begins in Jaipur, 2018, with brothers Rahul and Mohit Yadav — both working in senior roles at CarDekho and previously founders of a kids’ fashion brand that they sold in 2012.
Comfortable careers, but an itch remained:
“We wanted to build something big — something India hadn’t seen yet.”
Their first shot came in 2018 with Freewill, a personalized haircare startup built around individual hair profiles. The idea was fresh, clever, and backed by Sequoia’s Surge accelerator — India’s equivalent of Y Combinator.
Customers loved it —
● 2.5 lakh products sold
● 30,000+ reviews
● 80%+ 5-star ratings
But the business wasn’t scalable.
Personalized beauty meant high cost, slow production, and no possibility of touching millions of customers. The brothers shut Freewill down within two years and began searching for a model that could scale to ₹1,000+ crore.
The Market Insight
While building Freewill, the founders noticed something fundamental:
Indian beauty was dominated by marketing, not science.
Most brands built their identity around terms like:
organic
natural
chemical-free
herbal
Yet, studies showed that 79% of these green claims were misleading.
Consumers were buying packaging and promises — not proven ingredients.
At the same time, a young generation was silently becoming “skintellectual”:
researching ingredients, reading labels, watching dermatologists, and seeking efficacy over claims.
And India had no brand like The Ordinary — the Canadian brand famous for science-backed, ingredient-first formulations.
Mohit, a longtime admirer of The Ordinary, wondered:
“Is India ready for a transparent, scientific skincare brand?”
This became the spark.
Launch
In mid-2020, during the pandemic, Minimalist was born.
No influencer campaigns.
No ads.
No big launch event.
Just a single Instagram post saying:
“We are live.”
And one product:
1,000 bottles of a face serum.
What made it different?
Ingredients printed boldly on the front
Exact concentrations disclosed
Evidence-based explanations
No claims like “100% natural” or “chemical free”
Straightforward names like Niacinamide 10% and AHA 25%
Minimalist was not selling a story.
It was selling science.
And Indian consumers loved it.
The first 1,000 units sold out in 2–3 days — without spending a rupee on marketing.
Within weeks, beauty creators discovered the brand organically and posted about its transparency. The snowball had begun.
The Controversy
Minimalist gained traction — but also criticism.
Creators accused it of copying The Ordinary.
Instead of denying it, Mohit embraced it publicly:
“Minimalist wouldn’t exist if The Ordinary was in India.”
This honesty ironically strengthened the brand.
Minimalist wasn’t stealing an idea — it was executing a global idea in an Indian context.
And in India, context is everything:
Hot climate
Air pollution
Skin pigmentation issues
Humidity
Hard water
Minimalist created Indianised formulations designed for Indian skin conditions, not just Western templates.