Sometime in 2021, the factory owner slid the number across the table.<\/p>\n
Aditi Murarka Agrawal looked at it. Then at him. On his books sat IKEA\u2014400,000 units of that exact product, every single quarter. Not once in a while. Every quarter of predictable and committed volume. The kind that anchors a factory\u2019s capacity, smoothens cycles, and builds an entire business around it.<\/p>\n
Against that, Aditi barely existed.<\/p>\n
One product. A few thousand units. No history. No leverage. No reason for this vendor to give her anything except the standard small-buyer tax\u2014high prices, thin margins, and a \u201ctake it or leave it\u201d attitude.<\/p>\n
In rooms like this, the rules are understood. Large buyers set terms. Small ones adjust. Aditi knew that. She asked anyway. \u201cPrice me like IKEA,\u201d she pressed. \u201cNot for what I\u2019m buying today. For what I will.\u201d<\/p>\n
The factory owner didn\u2019t react immediately. A flicker of bemusement crossed his face. Small buyers don\u2019t speak like this. They trim expectations, protect margins, and leave quietly.<\/p>\n
Aditi, an XLRI alumna, didn\u2019t leave.<\/p>\n
She sat across from him with nothing in her hands\u2014no scale, no track record, no proof\u2014and asked for the same pricing IKEA had earned over decades. He didn\u2019t say yes. There was no refusal either. He paused long enough to register that this wasn\u2019t how the equation usually worked. And Aditi knew it. So, he kept listening.<\/p>\n
Why Aditi walked away from a management career to start Nestasia<\/strong><\/p>\n To understand what gave her that nerve, one has to go back to an afternoon in Jamshedpur. Sometime towards the end of 2019.<\/p>\n The air felt heavy. A conversation Aditi still remembers in fragments\u2014the light falling a certain way, the exact spot she was standing, the pause before her father spoke.<\/p>\n He had spent his life building businesses that didn\u2019t make headlines but held ground\u2014deep, operational, tied to the industrial machinery of East India and the Tatas. At the dinner table, he didn\u2019t shield his children from that world. He opened it up. Payment delays. Margins squeezed without warning. Decisions taken without clarity and lived with anyway.<\/p>\n Even then, she understood what a brutal quarter felt like. What it meant when a vendor doubled prices a week before delivery. What real uncertainty looked like when you were inside the room and the answer wasn\u2019t in a textbook. Aditi grew up inside that.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why, when she told him she wanted to start something of her own, her father didn\u2019t romanticise it.<\/p>\n \u201cPagal ho kya? (Are you crazy?)\u201d<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t sugar-coat it. Why walk away from a life that was already working? A stable career. A path that made sense. Predictability. Why throw it all away? \u201cThis is the stupidest thing you\u2019ve told me,\u201d she recalls her father telling her.<\/p>\n Aditi didn\u2019t respond with a pitch deck or a projection or a slide on total addressable market.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve been my biggest inspiration,\u201d the daughter said quietly. She held his gaze. \u201cI\u2019ve seen it. I know there will be struggles. But I also know what you built on the other side of it. That\u2019s what I want.\u201d<\/p>\n He went quiet. \u201cYou always have my blessings. But this is the one thing I\u2019m advising you against.\u201d He let that sit. \u201cOnce you go, Anurag is going to feel the pressure to go too,\u201d he sounded a word of caution. \u201cYou don\u2019t get a role at Goldman [Sachs] every day.\u201d<\/p>\n Anurag Agrawal\u2014her husband, her co-founder, the man she\u2019d known since school in Jamshedpur\u2014was an equity trader at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. He was an IIT Kanpur and IIM Ahmedabad alumnus. From all of India that year, Goldman had taken one person. One. And Anurag had it. Walking away wasn\u2019t just a career shift. It meant giving up something very few people ever get.<\/p>\n September 2019. She returned to India. Alone first, to test the ground before Anurag walked away from the Goldman seat. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to jump without a rope.\u201d That was the thinking.<\/p>\n The couple chose Kolkata as their base. Choosing the eastern city made strategic sense. \u201cFrom a business perspective, operating costs\u2014including warehousing, infrastructure\u2014and overall cost of living, etc. are significantly lower than in many other metro cities, allowing us to build the business more efficiently. Additionally, its proximity to Hong Kong, where we initially sourced many of our products, made travel and business operations far more convenient,\u201d Aditi explains.<\/p>\n The website went live quietly. Nestasia was born. There was no big launch or announcement. Just a few products, put together with what they could source and ship. The first orders trickled in.<\/p>\n But five months later, the world shut down.<\/p>\n Flights out of Hong Kong began disappearing\u2014first delayed, then cancelled, then gone altogether. Anurag was still there when the window started closing.<\/p>\n The pandemic test: How Nestasia built trust before it built scale<\/strong><\/p>\n Then came the call. One seat left on the last flight to India. Did he want it? Aditi didn\u2019t pause. \u201cWhatever you do, get on that flight.\u201d<\/p>\n He did. For the next seven months, there were no flights between Hong Kong and India. If he had missed that one seat, they would have spent the first year of the company building across continents\u2014separated by time zones, borders, and a system that had stopped moving.<\/p>\n But he made it. They were together. But their reward was a different problem. While the orders were coming in, they couldn\u2019t fulfil any of them. Supply chains had frozen. Movement was restricted. Warehouses weren\u2019t operational. The entire back end of the business had stalled.<\/p>\n The front end hadn\u2019t, though. Customers were still placing orders. Every day, Aditi picked up the phone and called customers. Every single one. \u201cThank you for trusting us. We need you to wait. We will get this to you.\u201d She was asking strangers to trust a brand that had barely existed before the crisis. No track record. No history. Nothing except a website and a promise. There was no script for this. No system to automate it. Just a voice on the other end, asking for time.<\/p>\n That mattered. Because in those early weeks, the business wasn\u2019t being built through marketing or scale. It was being built through credibility. One call. One promise. One fulfilled order at a time.<\/p>\n By the time the company was formally incorporated in September 2020, they had already been operating in fragments\u2014testing, learning, adjusting in real time. By FY21, just five months from that incorporation, they had clocked \u20b96.8 crore in revenue. The nest was being built. One careful twig at a time.<\/p>\n A few fiscals later, revenue had climbed to \u20b9111 crore, with a loss of \u20b97.7 crore in FY25, according to data sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler.<\/p>\n Fast forward to June 2026. Aditi says Nestasia is now running at an annual rate of around \u20b9300 crore. \u201cThe gap to profitability has narrowed,\u201d she claims. In July, Nestasia reported net revenue of \u20b9177 crore in FY26.<\/p>\n From there to here, the growth hasn\u2019t come from a single breakout year. No sudden spike. No moment where everything changed. It has been built layer by layer. The numbers moved quietly.<\/p>\n That trajectory mirrors a broader shift in the category.<\/p>\n \u201cIndia\u2019s home and lifestyle market is at a structural inflection point,\u201d says Bhavanipratap Rana of Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital, one of the backers of Nestasia. \u201cConsumers are moving from unbranded general trade to design-led, experience-first brands,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Nestasia has been building into that shift.<\/p>\n It may look inevitable. But the demand had been building long before the numbers showed it. The pandemic accelerated it\u2014locked homes, more time indoors, a sharper focus on living spaces. The category moved from background to foreground.<\/p>\n The insight: How Nestasia found India\u2019s $40-billion home d\u00e9cor opportunity<\/strong><\/p>\n Nestasia didn\u2019t arrive into that moment. It was already there. Not as a finished brand, but as something that had begun to understand what customers were reaching for. \u201cThe insight wasn\u2019t theoretical,\u201d Aditi says. \u201cWe had lived it.\u201d<\/p>\n Home d\u00e9cor in India sat at two ends. On one side, premium, design-heavy products that most people couldn\u2019t access. On the other, functional goods that solved for use, not for how a space felt. The middle was missing\u2014not cheap, not luxury, but something more considered, more accessible.<\/p>\n The opportunity itself remains wide open.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a $40-billion market in India, and it\u2019s largely unbranded,\u201d says Rahul Chowdhri of Stellaris Venture Partners, one of Nestasia\u2019s backers. \u201cIf you get the brand right, you\u2019re building a high-retention, high-value business.\u201d<\/p>\n While established players like IKEA and a few organised retailers are expanding the category, a sizeable portion of the market is still fragmented, creating a substantial opportunity for trusted, design-led brands.<\/p>\n The co-founders knew this from experience, not research decks.<\/p>\n In the years before Nestasia, Aditi and Anurag moved between Hong Kong and Singapore, setting up homes along the way\u2014small spaces they slowly built. Plants picked up over weekends. Objects sourced during travel. Pieces that didn\u2019t come from one store, but from time spent looking.<\/p>\n And every time something new came into the house, the same question followed from friends who visited them. \u201cWhere did you get this? Can you send one?\u201d they\u2019d ask, Aditi recalls.<\/p>\n That was the signal. They didn\u2019t need a deck after that.<\/p>\n At first, it was informal. A few pieces sent back. Then sourcing for boutique stores. No brand. No scale. Just movement. So, when demand picked up, it didn\u2019t feel like a breakthrough. It felt like validation. The business grew into that.<\/p>\n But not every decision held. Expanding into accessories\u2014bags, jewellery\u2014looked like the obvious next step. It didn\u2019t work, though.<\/p>\n \u201cWe thought adding more categories would grow the business faster,\u201d Aditi says. Then she pauses. But the consumer buying for her home is thinking very differently from when she\u2019s buying for herself. Nestasia had stretched the brand. It showed. The co-founders pulled back. Almost entirely.<\/p>\n The learning stayed. Not every white space is yours to fill, and scale comes from going deeper.<\/p>\n By 2021, the environment around them had shifted. Capital was abundant. Most startup founders were raising aggressively, spending faster, scaling with urgency. Valuations moved quicker than businesses. Burn became a signal\u2014not of risk, but of ambition.<\/p>\n The playbook was everywhere. Raise, grow, and raise again. From Kolkata, they watched it play out. Then they went back to their numbers.<\/p>\n When Stellaris first invested, the business looked quite different.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a single-channel D2C brand,\u201d says Chowdhri, adding that today Nestasia is one of the largest online-first home and lifestyle brands in the country. The expansion has been deliberate. The co-founders have built across e-commerce, quick commerce, and offline. \u201cThe growth has been disciplined and not just fast,\u201d he reckons.<\/p>\n From online to offline: How Nestasia built a profitable omnichannel brand<\/strong><\/p>\n The offline footprint is catching up with the brand\u2019s online presence. Nestasia now operates 14 stores across nine cities, with clusters in Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune. The strategy isn\u2019t just expansion but also immersion. Stores are designed to mirror how customers actually experience the brand: tactile, curated, and lived-in.<\/p>\n That discipline came with a constant trade-off. \u201cIt\u2019s very tempting,\u201d Aditi reckons. You see everyone raising, everyone scaling. \u201cBut you have to ask\u2014what do you actually need,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n An early investor pushed that question further: Why raise more than you need?<\/p>\n The question was \u2018not why raise\u2019 but \u2018why more\u2019. And it forced a different way of looking at the business. Equity wasn\u2019t just capital. It was the only asset compounding in the background. Every round diluted it. Every extra raise had a cost that didn\u2019t show up immediately.<\/p>\n So, the husband-wife duo did the math. How much do we need? For how long? What are we giving away? What does that become if we don\u2019t?<\/p>\n The answer was simple. Raise less, spend what you earn, and stay in control. While others scaled on capital, Nestasia scaled on cash flows. Profitability wasn\u2019t something to think about later. It was part of the build. \u201cRaising money sounds glamorous,\u201d says Aditi. \u201cIt actually gives me a lot of heartache.\u201d<\/p>\n She doesn\u2019t soften it. \u201cIt takes a piece of my heart away\u2014giving a part of my business away just to run it.\u201d That discomfort stayed. \u201cYour equity is the fastest-growing asset you have,\u201d an early investor had told them. \u201cIt\u2019s your most prized possession.\u201d<\/p>\n That changed how they looked at capital. Not just as fuel. But as something you lose. And staying put in Kolkata helped. Not because it gave them an advantage. Because it removed something else: Noise. There are no constant comparisons. No pressure to match someone else\u2019s pace. No ecosystem rhythm pushing decisions that didn\u2019t belong. \u201cYou\u2019re not reacting all the time,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can actually think.\u201d<\/p>\n That distance created space. They could look at their numbers without someone else\u2019s growth curve sitting next to it. They could decide based on what the business needed and not what the ecosystem rewarded. It sharpened the pressure. \u201cI think a certain level of paranoia is necessary,\u201d she says. \u201cIf you\u2019re not worried about where the next set of orders is coming from, you\u2019re not a founder.\u201d<\/p>\n That discipline showed up everywhere. Inventory wasn\u2019t a line item. It was a system. How much to stock. How fast it moves. How long it sits. Each decision carried a cost.<\/p>\n That complexity scales quickly in this category.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re dealing with thousands of SKUs across product lines,\u201d says Chowdhri of Stellaris Venture Partners. In a trend-driven space, inventory misjudgement is expensive. The edge, he points out, lies in prediction. \u201cYou need to stay ahead of demand without over-committing on stock.\u201d<\/p>\n The test ahead: Can Nestasia hold its discipline as it scales?<\/strong><\/p>\n That insight shaped how the co-founders operated. They paid attention. The same applied to supply chains. Early dependence on imports worked. They adjusted.<\/p>\n Today, Nestasia operates a design-led omnichannel D2C business model, offering a curated portfolio of home and lifestyle products across categories such as kitchen and dining, home d\u00e9cor, storage, soft furnishings, bath, and gifting.<\/p>\n Over half its products are sourced from India. Some manufactured in-house. The rest through contract manufacturing. \u201cOver time, you realise what you need to control,\u201d says Aditi. \u201cAnd what you don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n What seems to have worked for Nestasia, reckon marketing and branding experts, is a mix of positioning clarity and execution restraint. \u201cThey didn\u2019t just stumble on a white space,\u201d underlines Ashita Aggarwal, professor of marketing at the SP Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR). They mapped out the \u2018beautiful middle\u2019 of home decor\u2014the void between mass utility and unreachable luxury\u2014and anchored themselves to it. They refused to take the bait of adjacency-led growth.<\/p>\n More importantly, they built with the unyielding grit of an old-school merchant rather than the frantic impulse of a modern startup founder. They respected margins, treated inventory as a high-stakes puzzle, and guarded their equity like gold, even when the funding ecosystem was actively rewarding the opposite behaviour. \u201cThat brand of discipline compounds quietly in the background,\u201d says Aggarwal.<\/p>\n Pair that with an undeniable founder-market fit\u2014their global design literacy and hands-on experience setting up homes across Asia\u2014and you get an enterprise that feels completely intuitive, rather than engineered.<\/p>\n But discipline doesn\u2019t make you infallible. Not every experiment worked. The app they built from scratch\u2014expensive, time-consuming\u2014remains a question mark. The intent made sense: Control the platform and own the experience. But the cost was higher than expected. It didn\u2019t break the business.<\/p>\n It, however, reinforced something they already knew. Not every problem needs a heavy solution. Inside the company, the dynamic follows a similar pattern. Aditi moves fast, direct, and is into decisions. Anurag steadies, balances, and absorbs.<\/p>\n \u201cLike any entrepreneurial journey, there have been challenges, but building Nestasia together has made every milestone more meaningful. What started as a passion for beautiful, thoughtfully designed products has today become a brand that is part of millions of Indian homes,\u201d says Anurag.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat makes them exceptional is the clarity of roles,\u201d says Rana <\/strong>of Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital. Aditi drives the consumer narrative, while Anurag brings financial rigour to operations. It shows in how decisions get made.<\/p>\n The difference isn\u2019t friction. It\u2019s structure. Disagreements happen often over budgets, marketing, and direction. But one rule holds. The decision that works for Nestasia stands. Not for either of them. For the business. All of it\u2014finance, operations, decisions\u2014points back to the same idea: Restraint.<\/p>\n What Nestasia has built stands out for that reason. Most consumer brands at this stage chase scale first and figure out discipline later. Here, it has worked the other way around. That inversion has held so far. But it brings its own pressure.<\/p>\n \u201cAs you scale, the complexity doesn\u2019t just increase, it changes,\u201d reckons Aggarwal of SPJIMR. Holding that middle\u2014between accessibility and aspiration\u2014gets harder with every new category and every new channel.<\/p>\n The risk isn\u2019t slowing down. It\u2019s dilution. \u201cYou\u2019re constantly making trade-offs,\u201d she adds. Between depth and breadth and between speed and control. \u201cThe discipline that built the brand is what will be tested next,\u201d she underlines.<\/p>\n This brings the story back to that negotiating table with the IKEA vendor. Back to the number. Back to the imbalance. Nothing about that moment had changed.<\/p>\n Aditi still didn\u2019t have scale. Still didn\u2019t have leverage. Still didn\u2019t have the right to ask for what she was asking. So, she didn\u2019t argue from the present. She argued from the future. \u201cYou can\u2019t find another IKEA,\u201d she told him. \u201cThere\u2019s only one.\u201d<\/p>\n Then she pushed it further. \u201cBut markets like India can create the next one.\u201d She broke it down for him. His factory had capacity. IKEA filled a part of it. The rest was fragmented. \u201cYou won\u2019t replace them,\u201d she said. \u201cBut you can build another engine.\u201d Not today but over time. \u201cGive me the price that lets me compete. I\u2019ll give you consistency,\u201d was her pitch.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just confidence. It was a plan. He sat with it. Then he agreed.<\/p>\n Nestasia started small. A few thousand units. Today, they sell over 10,000 annually of that same product. Each order larger than the last. The math followed. Quietly.<\/p>\n Years later, the question flips.<\/p>\n What happens when a Nestasia customer walks into an IKEA store?<\/p>\n Aditi doesn\u2019t answer immediately. \u201cWe won\u2019t lose what people feel about us,\u201d she says. \u201cThat stays.\u201d She pauses. \u201cWhat we might lose is at a functional level\u2014scale, range, maybe pricing in some cases.\u201d<\/p>\n Then she shrugs. \u201cWe\u2019re getting there.\u201d And then: \u201cThey\u2019ll still come back.\u201d Because in the end, they weren\u2019t just buying products. They were buying how it made their homes feel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometime in 2021, the factory owner slid the number across the table. Aditi Murarka Agrawal looked at it.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":992981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[16],"tags":[398061,64,398068,212178,398066,607,398069,398064,38883,398063,398062,398070,398067,398065,398060,91426,397364,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-992980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-bootstrapped-growth","tag-business","tag-consumer-brand","tag-d2c-brand","tag-design-led","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-equity-dilution","tag-founder-story","tag-home-decor","tag-home-lifestyle","tag-ikea-pricing","tag-india-retail","tag-indian-homes","tag-kolkata-startup","tag-nestasia","tag-omnichannel","tag-profitability","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117071193509572780","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=992980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/992981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=992980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=992980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=992980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}