Nestasia and the Business of Making Ordinary Things Desirable

When Aditi Murarka Agrawal talks about a ceramic mug, she does not talk about it simply as a ceramic mug. Nestasia looks at what happens when the surface has an external texture, when the handle is made gold, when a gold rim is added or when a saucer is introduced. The company uses its own sales data to understand how these seemingly small changes affect consumer behaviour. For a brand built around the idea that everyday products can be better designed, this is where aesthetics meets the spreadsheet.

“We are very data-led and extremely data-centric,” says Agrawal, co-founder of Nestasia. But data is only one part of the company's product-development process. Design is the first filter, followed by quality and functionality, while international trends and social media provide another stream of ideas, Agrawal puts. The result is a business trying to make consumers look differently at objects they have traditionally treated as functional.

That ambition has taken Nestasia well beyond its original dining and crockery business. Today, dining and kitchen contribute about 80% of its revenue, and Agrawal says the company is running at more than ₹300 crore and is targeting ₹1,000 crore over the next three to four years. The company is expanding its offline footprint, taking greater control of its supply chain and pushing deeper into kitchenware, but the underlying proposition remains the same: if consumers are going to live with these products every day, why shouldn't they be better designed?

How much of Nestasia is actually Nestasia?

That brings the company to an important question, particularly for a brand that places so much emphasis on design: how much of what it sells is genuinely its own?

As per the company, around 30–35% of Nestasia's assortment is designed by the company and manufactured either at its own facility or through contract manufacturers. Another roughly 35% is developed alongside manufacturing partners. In these cases, the manufacturer may have an existing capability, but Nestasia's design team can make changes or adapt a product to make it more relevant to Indian consumers and the markets where it intends to sell. The remaining 30% is white-labelled or imported, although Agrawal says that share is declining.

The distinction is important because originality in consumer products does not necessarily mean inventing an object that has never existed before. A familiar product can be changed through its material, proportions, colours, functionality or design details. Nestasia is increasingly trying to be involved at that level rather than simply selecting an existing product and putting its brand name on it.

The ceramic mug is a useful example of how the company thinks. Its data can show whether consumers respond differently to an external texture, a gold handle, a gold rim or the addition of a saucer. Once those patterns emerge, they can influence how the assortment is expanded, which products receive more SKUs and where Nestasia sees white spaces.

But the company is not allowing data to become the sole arbiter of design. Social media and international trends are another source of ideas. Nestasia's creative teams are constantly looking at what is gaining traction across platforms, and those observations feed back into merchandising and product development. The company also looks at international trends, particularly when a product or design begins to travel across markets.

There is, however, a difference between following a trend and making it your own. Nestasia's approach is to put every trend through its own filters. “Design is obviously the first filter,” Agrawal says. “The second filter is quality and the third is functionality.”

Speed is part of that process. The company wants the journey from an idea to a product going live on its website to be short, generally around a month to a month and a half. Some products are developed in response to trends, while others are planned months ahead around particular occasions. The idea is to remain nimble without allowing speed to come at the expense of the product itself.

“We want it to be unique,” Agrawal says. “We want it to be something that is better than what is usual.”

The consumer is bigger than a demographic

The same thinking informs Nestasia's understanding of its customer. About 50% of its audience comes from metros and Tier 1 cities, while the other 50% comes from the rest of India. There is a proportion of consumers from Tier 4 and Tier 5 markets as well, although Agrawal admits the company has not yet done enough to specifically reach or communicate with them.

She is also less convinced by the neat audience cohorts that marketers often use to define consumers. “Anybody who has a home and runs a home is our audience,” she says. That includes consumers already buying high-end products and those who are moving up from basic functional products and looking for something better.

The company's geographical split is similarly broad. North, West and South India account for about 85% of the business. West is currently the largest market, South is the fastest-growing and North is where Nestasia has its strongest offline presence. The company now has 15 exclusive brand outlets and hopes to reach about 25 by the end of the financial year.

North was where Nestasia first consolidated its physical presence. It has four stores in Noida, three in Gurgaon, one in Delhi, one in Dehradun and one in Mohali, with another coming up in Jaipur. It also has two stores in Pune. Noida, in particular, has turned into an interesting test of the company's offline strategy.

The company moved one store from DLF to Mall of India when the mall offered the opportunity. It later opened another store about four kilometres away, in a different mall. Both have performed well, Agrawal says, because of the population density, housing complexes and the concentration of its target demographic. “You'd be surprised to know that all four stores are doing really well,” she says.

The insight behind the offline expansion came from observing how consumers shop for home products. Those who prefer to buy offline do not necessarily shop online in the same way. That made physical retail important not simply as another sales channel but as a way of giving consumers the same experience they get from Nestasia online. Agrawal says the company's stores are already EBITDA positive, in double digits, across the network.

Why East India behaves differently

There is an interesting contradiction in Nestasia's regional story. The company is headquartered in Kolkata, but East India and Central India together account for only around 15% of its business. Agrawal does not believe that makes the region inherently difficult. Rather, consumer behaviour and cultural occasions can produce very different purchasing patterns.

Durga Puja illustrates the point. For a home and lifestyle brand, Diwali is a major consumption period because consumers are at home, gifting and upgrading their surroundings. In East India, particularly within the Bengali community, Durga Puja is a similarly important cultural occasion, but people spend much of that period outside the home, celebrating and socialising. Clothing becomes a much larger purchase and gifting category, while home improvement plays a smaller role.

That does not mean East India lacks consumers who care about design. Nestasia's first Kolkata store on Russell Street is one of its best-performing stores. The lesson, Agrawal says, is that the market needs to be understood at a more granular level. Assortment and local sensibilities can matter as much as broad regional classifications.

For now, Nestasia is choosing to apply that thinking to India rather than rushing overseas. The company has conducted several international tests and fulfilled some orders, but there is no concerted international expansion plan yet. Agrawal believes India itself is large enough to keep the company occupied until it reaches ₹2,500–3,000 crore.

The immediate ambition, therefore, is not to become an international home brand. It is to become a significant Indian one.

Growing without burning cash

Reaching ₹1,000 crore will require Nestasia to expand across several fronts simultaneously. Offline is one. Supply is another. The company is looking to own more of its supply chain wherever it becomes confident about a product or category. Insulated bottles are its first inroad into greater supply-chain ownership, and the intention is to build more control where it makes commercial and strategic sense.

Marketing is being approached with similar discipline. Nestasia wants to grow, create attention and run campaigns that keep the brand visible, but Agrawal says it has deliberately avoided the familiar cycle of raising money, spending aggressively on customer acquisition and then raising again.

“It is not necessarily about being frugal,” she says. “It is about being efficient and building an efficiency-oriented organisation.”

The company says it is growing at around 80–100% year-on-year. Agrawal expects it to be EBITDA positive this year, and says it was positive in the previous month and expects to remain so. That is significant because the company's expansion is happening alongside an effort to build sustainable profitability rather than treating losses as the unavoidable price of scale.

For Nestasia, then, the ₹1,000 crore target is not simply a matter of opening more stores or adding more products. It requires the company to preserve the proposition that brought consumers to it in the first place while making that proposition work across a much larger business.

And for Agrawal, that proposition ultimately comes down to something less tangible than revenue.

“Revenue and commercial numbers aside, it is repeats and, in essence, brand love,” she says. What matters is what the consumer thinks of when they hear the name Nestasia, what space the brand occupies in their mind and what emotion it triggers.

Once that happens, she believes, the commercial benefits follow. Consumers return, buy across categories, shop through different channels and recommend the brand to others.

It is also what brings Nestasia back to the question of design. India does not lack mugs, plates, bottles, cookware or storage products. It has never lacked them. What Nestasia is trying to create is a reason to choose one over another, and increasingly, a reason to replace something that already works with something that works and feels better.

That may be the more difficult proposition to scale. A product can be copied, a trend can be replicated and an assortment can be expanded. A distinctive point of view is harder to manufacture.

Nestasia's larger bet, ultimately, is that consumers will recognise that point of view in the objects around them. And if it can make a mug, a bottle, a dinner plate or a piece of cookware feel unmistakably like Nestasia, then its ambition is no longer just to sell more things for the home. It is to shape how Indians think about the everyday things they bring into it.