Beardo's founders sold to Marico, then rebuilt a stalled beauty line into RENÉE Cosmetics

Mass-premium colour cosmetics and skincare: 200+ SKUs across six categories, sold D2C, on Amazon India, Nykaa and Flipkart, and in 1,200+ offline stores.

That the playbook that built a men's grooming brand — distribution, product-market fit, pricing — could win the far bigger women's beauty market.

$50.7M (INR 439.3 Cr) from investors including Evolvence India and the Edelweiss Group; INR 100 Cr Series B in June 2024.

Beardo made the founders successful in men's grooming, but Valani kept asking what came next: a JP Morgan report put the male grooming market at INR 15.1K Cr growing 6% — a niche, 'we realised we were playing in a niche'. Goradia's Rene by Aashka had product craft but no distribution bandwidth; the trio rebranded it RENÉE Cosmetics and rebuilt the business together.

Covid-19 struck just as the September 2020 relaunch approached; the team used the downtime to refine products. Within the first year RENÉE hit a INR 1 Cr monthly run rate, a 10x rise from INR 9–10 lakh. The Fab 5 lipstick became the breakout, followed by the Madness pH Lipstick that shifts to a custom pink and the Bollywood Filter Primer. By late 2021 it expanded offline with shop-in-shop models; FY24 revenue grew 97.3% to INR 191.65 Cr, though losses rose 88.2% to INR 61.45 Cr on marketing spend.

Still scaling: 200+ SKUs, beta runs in the US, UAE and Australia, and a stated path to full-year profitability in FY26.

Men's grooming was capped: a INR 15.1K Cr market growing 6% against a projected 11%, with Gillette taking half the razor segment.

Goradia had built product development and procurement but hit a wall on distribution while balancing an acting career.

The founders brought proof they could scale — Beardo's product-market fit, consumer behaviour and pricing playbook — and applied it to a stalled brand rather than starting from zero.

Product innovation led: multi-use formats like the Fab 5 and pH lipstick created newness in a market where consumers had accepted a matte-or-glossy status quo.

Selling a category-defining brand doesn't retire the playbook: founders who know product-market fit and distribution can take over someone else's stalled brand and scale it into a market leader.

As of the February 2025 Inc42 deep-dive, RENÉE offers 200+ SKUs across six categories, sells through its D2C site, Amazon India, Nykaa, Flipkart and 1,200+ offline stores, and has begun beta runs in the US, UAE and Australia. It passed the INR 400 Cr ARR threshold, was tracking INR 350 Cr revenue for FY25, and says it is working toward full-year profitability in FY26.