Kay Beauty Success Story: India’s First Celebrity Founded Beauty Brand To Actually Scale

Celebrity-branded products are not new to Indian retail. What was new, in October 2019, was a Bollywood star co-founding a beauty company with India’s largest beauty retailer, rather than simply lending her name and face to someone else’s product line. That distinction has turned out to matter more than it might have seemed at launch.

Kay Beauty was founded as a joint venture between actor Katrina Kaif and Nykaa, launching across 50 Nykaa stores and the Nykaa website and app in what the companies described at the time as an unprecedented pan-India rollout for a debut beauty brand. Six years later, Kay Beauty has grown into what industry coverage now widely refers to as India’s fastest-growing celebrity-founded beauty line, with a gross merchandise value run rate that crossed ₹240 crore in FY25, according to figures Nykaa disclosed to the National Stock Exchange as a listed company.

A Joint Venture, Not An Endorsement Deal

The structure of Kay Beauty’s founding is central to understanding why it has outlasted most other celebrity beauty ventures in India. Katrina Kaif holds a co-founder and creative director role at the company, a position that, according to the brand’s own account of its development process, involves direct input into formulation, shade ranges, and product direction rather than a marketing sign-off applied after the fact.

“I could imagine no better beauty partner in India than Nykaa to launch this brand,” Katrina Kaif said at the time of the launch. “Not only do they have a deep understanding of their consumers, but also this amazing reach which will allow Kay Beauty to be available to everyone across India.”

Nykaa’s leadership has described the partnership in similar terms of genuine collaboration rather than a licensing arrangement.

“The launch of Kay Beauty is a proud moment for Nykaa as India’s first celebrity beauty brand,” said Falguni Nayar, founder and CEO of Nykaa, at launch. “I have always been an admirer of Katrina’s independent spirit and was inspired by her vision to create this unique collection.”

Reena Chhabra, then CEO of Nykaa Brands, credited the brand’s product development process directly to Kaif’s involvement:

“Bringing Kay Beauty to life has been an amazing journey to witness Katrina’s passion, care and commitment to each product. These unique formulas meet her exacting demands for products that are high performing, professional and ultra-glamorous, all while caring for the skin.”

The brand’s founding product philosophy centred on a specific tension Kaif has spoken about from her own experience in front of the camera: the need for makeup that survives long shoot days without damaging the skin underneath it. That insight shaped the brand’s original tagline, #MakeupThatKares, and its debut collection, built around lip, eye, and brow products designed for ease of use under the broader theme of “makeup on the go.”

Built Around Inclusivity And Accessible Pricing

Kay Beauty’s product strategy has stayed consistent since launch: a wide shade range designed to serve the diversity of Indian skin tones, a catalogue spanning lips, eyes, face, and brow products, and pricing positioned to be accessible to a broad, primarily urban millennial and Gen Z customer base. An average Kay Beauty product is priced at approximately ₹299, a deliberate positioning against most other celebrity-owned beauty brands in India, many of which launch at price points starting several multiples higher.

The brand’s tagline, “It’s Kay To Be You,” is built around a message of self-acceptance, a positioning Kaif has described in personal terms.

“I wanted a space where there is no stereotype of beauty, where everyone’s accepted, everyone’s beautiful, everyone fits in,” Katrina Kaif has said of the brand’s identity. “That’s where our tagline came from: it’s Kay to be you. However you are, it’s okay to be you. K is also my name, so it felt personal.”

Kay Beauty was also an early mover on sustainable packaging within India’s mass-premium beauty segment, incorporating recycled PET into elements like lip crayon caps and outer cartons at a time when most competitors in the category prioritised glossy, disposable packaging over material sourcing.

Surviving A Pandemic Launch Window

Kay Beauty’s timing carried obvious risk. The brand launched in late 2019, less than half a year before COVID-19 triggered a nationwide lockdown that devastated large parts of India’s retail sector. Rather than stalling, the brand’s early growth held up through that period, helped by Nykaa’s established e-commerce infrastructure at a moment when online beauty shopping was accelerating broadly across the Indian market, a trend independently observed in consumer research from that period.

The brand’s offline footprint has expanded substantially in the years since. By late 2024, Kay Beauty was available in more than 300 retail stores spanning over 1,600 cities, alongside its presence on Nykaa’s digital platforms.

The brand was named Breakout Brand of the Year at the 19th edition of the CNBC-TV18 India Business Leader Awards, and has built a marketing approach anchored in social media storytelling, drawing on Kaif’s large public following to share product development and behind-the-scenes content rather than relying solely on traditional celebrity endorsement formats.

Going Global Through Nysaa

In March 2024, Kay Beauty extended beyond India for the first time, launching in the United Arab Emirates through Nysaa Beauty Store, a joint venture between Nykaa and Apparel Group operating in the Gulf region. Kaif framed the move as a long-held ambition rather than an opportunistic expansion.

“It was always my vision to take Kay Beauty global and share our offering with customers across different geographies, so they can experience the product first-hand,” Katrina Kaif said at the time. “The brand’s foray into the GCC allows us to tap into a market that is very passionate about beauty and Indian cinema.”

The UAE launch positioned Kay Beauty within a broader pattern across Indian beauty retail, in which homegrown D2C and celebrity brands have increasingly sought GCC and diaspora markets as a first step toward international relevance, leveraging existing distribution partnerships rather than building international infrastructure from scratch.

The Market Kay Beauty Helped Create

Kay Beauty’s rise tracks alongside two parallel shifts in India’s beauty industry. The first is the scale of the category itself: India’s broader cosmetics market was valued at approximately $23.86 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $44.63 billion by 2032, while the more specific D2C beauty and personal care segment is growing considerably faster, at a projected CAGR of roughly 36% through 2032, as digital-first brands and quick commerce platforms reshape how Indian consumers discover and purchase beauty products.

The second shift is more specific to Kay Beauty’s own category: the emergence of celebrity-founded beauty brands as a recognised, investable segment of the Indian beauty industry rather than a marketing novelty. Kay Beauty’s early traction is widely credited with opening that category. In the years following its launch, several other Indian celebrities, including Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Masaba Gupta, and Sonakshi Sinha, have launched their own beauty or personal care lines, a pattern industry observers have linked directly to the commercial proof of concept Kay Beauty established first.

What The Brand’s Trajectory Suggests

Kay Beauty’s most distinguishing characteristic, six years into its existence, is not that a major Bollywood star backed a beauty brand. Several had tried that before, with considerably less durable results. It is that the brand was structured from the outset as a genuine operating partnership between a public figure with deep category interest and a retailer with the distribution infrastructure to support sustained growth, rather than a short-term licensing arrangement built primarily around a name.

Whether that structure continues to scale at its current pace, particularly as Kay Beauty pushes further into international markets and faces an increasingly crowded field of both legacy and newly launched celebrity-backed competitors, will depend on the same fundamentals that have carried it this far: shade range, formulation quality, and accessible pricing executed consistently enough that the product, not the name behind it, keeps customers returning.

Kay Beauty is a joint venture between Katrina Kaif and Nykaa, available on Nykaa’s platforms across India and through Nysaa Beauty Store in tahe United Arab Emirates.