FAE Beauty - How Karishma Kewalramani Built India's Most Inclusive Cosmetics Brand

Karishma Kewalramani started her Shark Tank pitch with an overlooked insight in the beauty industry: 74% percent of Indian women fall into the brown, dark brown, or intense brown skin category. 

Yet any cosmetics store will sell foundation shades mostly designed for fair skin. 

That's the insight that birthed FAE Beauty, and that's the market inefficiency that turned a Berkeley-educated consultant into one of India's most authentic startup founders.

In FY25, they reported a revenue of $2.45 million.

Here’s everything you need to know about FAE Beauty at a glance:

Let’s look at their start-up journey!

The Personal Wound That Became a Market Opportunity

Growing up in Mumbai, Karishma struggled with colorism, the insidious hierarchy within brown skin that privileges lighter tones. 

Working in the U.S. made her realise that brands there celebrated diverse skin tones. Products were formulated for different undertones and textures. And the messaging felt real. India, by contrast, was stuck in a loop where beauty meant fair skin, tall frames, and airbrushed perfection.

So Karishma enrolled in makeup school. She worked as a makeup artist on film and TV sets. She spent a year understanding formulations, textures, and the technical craft behind cosmetics. 

And everywhere she looked, she saw the same gap: Indian beauty products weren't designed for Indian people. They were designed for an idealized, westernized version of beauty that a small percent of the population could aspire to.

Armed with savings from her U.S. consulting days and support from friends, family, and mentors, she began working on FAE Beauty in early 2018. 

The brand officially launched in August 2019 with a simple mission: create affordable, high-quality, inclusive products for all Indian skin tones, ages, genders, and identities. 

The name itself, FAE, stood for "Free and Equal." (Free as in liberation, not complimentary.)

The Consumer Insight That Changed Everything

India's beauty and personal care market is projected to grow to $40 Billion by 2030, with new-age brands expected to make INR 100 Cr+ annually by then.

FAE Beauty tapped into this shift with precision. The brand's no-Photoshop policy wasn't a gimmick, it was a statement of values. Campaign images featured real people with visible pores, texture, and unretouched skin. 

It was a mirror held up to Indian consumers who had been told, implicitly and explicitly, that they needed to look different to be beautiful.

The consumer insight extended to product development. FAE's hero product, the Lip Whip, is a buildable matte lipstick that adapts to the wearer's natural skin tone. It multitasks as blush and eyeshadow.

The formula was designed in-house, a rarity for a bootstrapped startup competing against multinational conglomerates with billion-dollar R&D budgets.

What made this work strategically was focus. FAE didn't try to be everything to everyone. Early iterations included multiple SKUs, experimenting with cleansers, sunscreens, mascaras, primers, and more. Some products didn't find product-market fit and were discontinued.

The turning point came when Karishma realized that hero products matter more than expansive catalogs. Lip Whip became the engine. Everything else became support.

The Competition

FAE Beauty operates in one of India's most competitive sectors. The company faces 855 active competitors. The top competitors include Pilgrim, BELLAVITA, and Mamaearth.

Pilgrim offers multi-category natural beauty products with a focus on vegan, chemical-free formulations. Pilgrim's revenue is roughly thirty times FAE's current numbers, demonstrating the scale difference.

BELLAVITA focuses on fragrances, makeup, and skincare with strong offline retail expansion. Its success shows that profitability is achievable in this sector, but it requires either massive scale or extreme operational discipline.

Mamaearth's focus on toxin-free beauty positioned it as the poster child for India's clean beauty movement, though the company has faced scrutiny over ingredient claims and marketing practices.

What sets FAE apart in this crowded landscape is mission clarity. FAE is built around inclusivity for brown skin, gender diversity, and authentic representation.

So, though competition is intense and increasing, this positioning gap, the launch timing, Shark Tank credibility, and Karishma’s personal branding has given the brand leverage over others.

Distribution and Discoverability

FAE Beauty operates as a digital-first, direct-to-consumer brand. It also sells through its own website, Nykaa, and quick commerce platforms like Blinkit and Zepto. 

This omnichannel approach reflects a pragmatic reality: Indian consumers shop wherever convenience meets trust.

Quick commerce, in particular, became a strategic lever. Within three months of launching on these platforms, quick commerce contributed 25% of FAE's overall revenue. The speed of delivery, typically under thirty minutes, aligned perfectly with impulse beauty purchases. 

A centralised Unicommerce dashboard managed inventory across marketplaces, ensuring timely deliveries and preventing stockouts. This streamlined operations, eliminated manual purchase orders, and enabled FAE to manage operational chaos while scaling.

For discoverability, FAE built community through influencer collaborations, user-generated content, and regional marketing strategies. The brand didn't chase mega-influencers with millions of followers. Instead, it partnered with micro-influencers who had authentic engagement and whose audiences mirrored FAE's target demographic. 

Burn Rates, Down Rounds, and Hard Pivots

Every honest startup story includes a near-death experience.

In FY 2020-21, FAE generated ₹30 lakh in revenue but burned ₹80 lakh. The following year, revenue climbed to ₹70 lakh, but losses ballooned to ₹1.5 crore. By FY 2022-23, revenue hit ₹3.3 crore, but losses were ₹2.5 crore. The trend was clear: growth without profitability. (Source)

The funding rounds reflected this struggle. FAE raised ₹1.5 crore at a ₹6 crore valuation in FY 2020-21. The next round brought in ₹2.4 crore at ₹26 crore. Then came two rounds in FY 2023-24: ₹2 crore at ₹32 crore, followed by ₹3 crore at a down round of ₹22 crore.

A down round means "we overestimated our value and had to reset expectations." It's humbling, painful, and often necessary.

Karishma faced operational challenges that plagued most D2C brands: high return-to-origin (RTO) rates and long checkout times. RTOs are particularly brutal in India's cash-on-delivery-heavy e-commerce ecosystem.

A customer orders, doesn't pay upfront, then refuses delivery. The brand eats the shipping cost both ways, plus lost inventory opportunity.

The solution came through integrating Magic Checkout, a Razorpay tool that used AI to evaluate order risk. The platform disabled cash-on-delivery for high-risk orders based on historical customer data and address accuracy. It provided actionable insights, allowing FAE to block specific pin codes and IP addresses with increased RTO histories. And it offered RTO protection, covering return costs for Magic-approved orders that still encountered issues. The result: a 33% reduction in RTO rates. Operational efficiency improved dramatically. Customer satisfaction went up.

Technological adaptation was a part of other business strategies like hero-product focus and discontinuing non-performing SKUs. 

By FY 2024-25, FAE achieved its first profitable year. By October 2024, the brand had generated ₹10 crore in revenue with ₹1.25 crore in profit. Projected revenue for the full year: ₹22 crore. The turnaround was complete.