The direct to consumer or D2C companies want your engagement and they want your loyalty. And to make sure they have both, they have created a concept called the house of brands! The primary "brand" in this model is the product rather than the parent brand that owns it.

The young startups, the traditional large corporate houses- everyone wants a piece of this pie.

The playbook for this is pretty simple -step one, raise funds from investors, step 2 - use the funds to acquire brands and make investments, and step 3 - grow the acquired brands to scale. That in a nutshell is what house of brands is all about.

Indian startups are aggregating small but promising online products like never before, hoping to scale them into large global brands! And investors are pouring millions of dollars into the idea.

One such brand is Mensa. Mensa was founded in May 2021 by Ananth Narayanan, former CEO of Myntra and Medlife. Mensa's business strategy is to acquires D2C brands, nurture them and help them scale within the home market and overseas.

The brands under Mensa include Karagiri, Anubhutee, Villain Florona, Dennis Lingo and the list goes on.

Mensa is not the only player in this space! Globalbees, also built around the same house of brand model- entered the unicorn club soon after Mensa in December of 2021. Personal care-focused e-commerce platform Honasa Consumer, which sells its products under the Mamaearth labels is also building its portfolio, and recently bought BBlunt from Godrej Consumer and others for Rs 135 crores.

The US company which pioneered this model of house of brands in the D2C space is Thrasio. It has entered India with a 500 million war chest - through its acquisition in consumer durables brand Lifelong where it bought a majority stake.

To discuss road ahead for house of brands model, CNBC-TV18 spoke to Ananth Narayanan, Founder of Mensa Brands and Bharat Kalia, Co-Founder & CEO of Lifelong Online.

Watch video for more.

First Published:Feb 23, 2022 6:43 PM IST