How Nestasia built a nearly ₹180-crore brand by refusing the startup playbook

Sometime in 2021, the factory owner slid the number across the table.

Aditi Murarka Agrawal looked at it. Then at him. On his books sat IKEA—400,000 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’s capacity, smoothens cycles, and builds an entire business around it.

Against that, Aditi barely existed.

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—high prices, thin margins, and a “take it or leave it” attitude.

In rooms like this, the rules are understood. Large buyers set terms. Small ones adjust. Aditi knew that. She asked anyway. “Price me like IKEA,” she pressed. “Not for what I’m buying today. For what I will.”

The factory owner didn’t react immediately. A flicker of bemusement crossed his face. Small buyers don’t speak like this. They trim expectations, protect margins, and leave quietly.

Aditi, an XLRI alumna, didn’t leave.

She sat across from him with nothing in her hands—no scale, no track record, no proof—and asked for the same pricing IKEA had earned over decades. He didn’t say yes. There was no refusal either. He paused long enough to register that this wasn’t how the equation usually worked. And Aditi knew it. So, he kept listening.

Why Aditi walked away from a management career to start Nestasia

To understand what gave her that nerve, one has to go back to an afternoon in Jamshedpur. Sometime towards the end of 2019.

The air felt heavy. A conversation Aditi still remembers in fragments—the light falling a certain way, the exact spot she was standing, the pause before her father spoke.

He had spent his life building businesses that didn’t make headlines but held ground—deep, operational, tied to the industrial machinery of East India and the Tatas. At the dinner table, he didn’t shield his children from that world. He opened it up. Payment delays. Margins squeezed without warning. Decisions taken without clarity and lived with anyway.

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’t in a textbook. Aditi grew up inside that.

That’s why, when she told him she wanted to start something of her own, her father didn’t romanticise it.

“Pagal ho kya? (Are you crazy?)”

He didn’t 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? “This is the stupidest thing you’ve told me,” she recalls her father telling her.

Aditi didn’t respond with a pitch deck or a projection or a slide on total addressable market.

“You’ve been my biggest inspiration,” the daughter said quietly. She held his gaze. “I’ve seen it. I know there will be struggles. But I also know what you built on the other side of it. That’s what I want.”

He went quiet. “You always have my blessings. But this is the one thing I’m advising you against.” He let that sit. “Once you go, Anurag is going to feel the pressure to go too,” he sounded a word of caution. “You don’t get a role at Goldman [Sachs] every day.”

He was right.

Anurag Agrawal—her husband, her co-founder, the man she’d known since school in Jamshedpur—was 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’t just a career shift. It meant giving up something very few people ever get.

Aditi went anyway.

September 2019. She returned to India. Alone first, to test the ground before Anurag walked away from the Goldman seat. “You’ve got to jump without a rope.” That was the thinking.

The couple chose Kolkata as their base. Choosing the eastern city made strategic sense. “From a business perspective, operating costs—including warehousing, infrastructure—and 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,” Aditi explains.

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.

But five months later, the world shut down.

Flights out of Hong Kong began disappearing—first delayed, then cancelled, then gone altogether. Anurag was still there when the window started closing.

The pandemic test: How Nestasia built trust before it built scale

Then came the call. One seat left on the last flight to India. Did he want it? Aditi didn’t pause. “Whatever you do, get on that flight.”

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—separated by time zones, borders, and a system that had stopped moving.

But he made it. They were together. But their reward was a different problem. While the orders were coming in, they couldn’t fulfil any of them. Supply chains had frozen. Movement was restricted. Warehouses weren’t operational. The entire back end of the business had stalled.

The front end hadn’t, though. Customers were still placing orders. Every day, Aditi picked up the phone and called customers. Every single one. “Thank you for trusting us. We need you to wait. We will get this to you.” 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.

Most people waited.

That mattered. Because in those early weeks, the business wasn’t being built through marketing or scale. It was being built through credibility. One call. One promise. One fulfilled order at a time.

By the time the company was formally incorporated in September 2020, they had already been operating in fragments—testing, learning, adjusting in real time. By FY21, just five months from that incorporation, they had clocked ₹6.8 crore in revenue. The nest was being built. One careful twig at a time.

A few fiscals later, revenue had climbed to ₹111 crore, with a loss of ₹7.7 crore in FY25, according to data sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler.

Fast forward to June 2026. Aditi says Nestasia is now running at an annual rate of around ₹300 crore. “The gap to profitability has narrowed,” she claims. In July, Nestasia reported net revenue of ₹177 crore in FY26.

From there to here, the growth hasn’t 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.

That trajectory mirrors a broader shift in the category.

“India’s home and lifestyle market is at a structural inflection point,” says Bhavanipratap Rana of Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital, one of the backers of Nestasia. “Consumers are moving from unbranded general trade to design-led, experience-first brands,” he says.

Nestasia has been building into that shift.

It may look inevitable. But the demand had been building long before the numbers showed it. The pandemic accelerated it—locked homes, more time indoors, a sharper focus on living spaces. The category moved from background to foreground.

The insight: How Nestasia found India’s $40-billion home décor opportunity

Nestasia didn’t 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. “The insight wasn’t theoretical,” Aditi says. “We had lived it.”

Home décor in India sat at two ends. On one side, premium, design-heavy products that most people couldn’t access. On the other, functional goods that solved for use, not for how a space felt. The middle was missing—not cheap, not luxury, but something more considered, more accessible.

The opportunity itself remains wide open.

“This is a $40-billion market in India, and it’s largely unbranded,” says Rahul Chowdhri of Stellaris Venture Partners, one of Nestasia’s backers. “If you get the brand right, you’re building a high-retention, high-value business.”

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.

The co-founders knew this from experience, not research decks.

In the years before Nestasia, Aditi and Anurag moved between Hong Kong and Singapore, setting up homes along the way—small spaces they slowly built. Plants picked up over weekends. Objects sourced during travel. Pieces that didn’t come from one store, but from time spent looking.

And every time something new came into the house, the same question followed from friends who visited them. “Where did you get this? Can you send one?” they’d ask, Aditi recalls.

That was the signal. They didn’t need a deck after that.

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’t feel like a breakthrough. It felt like validation. The business grew into that.

But not every decision held. Expanding into accessories—bags, jewellery—looked like the obvious next step. It didn’t work, though.

“We thought adding more categories would grow the business faster,” Aditi says. Then she pauses. But the consumer buying for her home is thinking very differently from when she’s buying for herself. Nestasia had stretched the brand. It showed. The co-founders pulled back. Almost entirely.

The learning stayed. Not every white space is yours to fill, and scale comes from going deeper.

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—not of risk, but of ambition.

The playbook was everywhere. Raise, grow, and raise again. From Kolkata, they watched it play out. Then they went back to their numbers.

When Stellaris first invested, the business looked quite different.

“It was a single-channel D2C brand,” 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. “The growth has been disciplined and not just fast,” he reckons.

From online to offline: How Nestasia built a profitable omnichannel brand

The offline footprint is catching up with the brand’s online presence. Nestasia now operates 14 stores across nine cities, with clusters in Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune. The strategy isn’t just expansion but also immersion. Stores are designed to mirror how customers actually experience the brand: tactile, curated, and lived-in.

That discipline came with a constant trade-off. “It’s very tempting,” Aditi reckons. You see everyone raising, everyone scaling. “But you have to ask—what do you actually need,” she says.

An early investor pushed that question further: Why raise more than you need?

The question was ‘not why raise’ but ‘why more’. And it forced a different way of looking at the business. Equity wasn’t just capital. It was the only asset compounding in the background. Every round diluted it. Every extra raise had a cost that didn’t show up immediately.

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’t?

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’t something to think about later. It was part of the build. “Raising money sounds glamorous,” says Aditi. “It actually gives me a lot of heartache.”

She doesn’t soften it. “It takes a piece of my heart away—giving a part of my business away just to run it.” That discomfort stayed. “Your equity is the fastest-growing asset you have,” an early investor had told them. “It’s your most prized possession.”

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’s pace. No ecosystem rhythm pushing decisions that didn’t belong. “You’re not reacting all the time,” she says. “You can actually think.”

That distance created space. They could look at their numbers without someone else’s 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. “I think a certain level of paranoia is necessary,” she says. “If you’re not worried about where the next set of orders is coming from, you’re not a founder.”

That discipline showed up everywhere. Inventory wasn’t a line item. It was a system. How much to stock. How fast it moves. How long it sits. Each decision carried a cost.

That complexity scales quickly in this category.

“You’re dealing with thousands of SKUs across product lines,” says Chowdhri of Stellaris Venture Partners. In a trend-driven space, inventory misjudgement is expensive. The edge, he points out, lies in prediction. “You need to stay ahead of demand without over-committing on stock.”

The test ahead: Can Nestasia hold its discipline as it scales?

That insight shaped how the co-founders operated. They paid attention. The same applied to supply chains. Early dependence on imports worked. They adjusted.

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 décor, storage, soft furnishings, bath, and gifting.

Over half its products are sourced from India. Some manufactured in-house. The rest through contract manufacturing. “Over time, you realise what you need to control,” says Aditi. “And what you don’t.”

What seems to have worked for Nestasia, reckon marketing and branding experts, is a mix of positioning clarity and execution restraint. “They didn’t just stumble on a white space,” underlines Ashita Aggarwal, professor of marketing at the SP Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR). They mapped out the ‘beautiful middle’ of home decor—the void between mass utility and unreachable luxury—and anchored themselves to it. They refused to take the bait of adjacency-led growth.

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. “That brand of discipline compounds quietly in the background,” says Aggarwal.

Pair that with an undeniable founder-market fit—their global design literacy and hands-on experience setting up homes across Asia—and you get an enterprise that feels completely intuitive, rather than engineered.

But discipline doesn’t make you infallible. Not every experiment worked. The app they built from scratch—expensive, time-consuming—remains a question mark. The intent made sense: Control the platform and own the experience. But the cost was higher than expected. It didn’t break the business.

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.

“Like 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,” says Anurag.

“What makes them exceptional is the clarity of roles,” says Rana of Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital. Aditi drives the consumer narrative, while Anurag brings financial rigour to operations. It shows in how decisions get made.

The difference isn’t friction. It’s 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—finance, operations, decisions—points back to the same idea: Restraint.

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.

“As you scale, the complexity doesn’t just increase, it changes,” reckons Aggarwal of SPJIMR. Holding that middle—between accessibility and aspiration—gets harder with every new category and every new channel.

The risk isn’t slowing down. It’s dilution. “You’re constantly making trade-offs,” she adds. Between depth and breadth and between speed and control. “The discipline that built the brand is what will be tested next,” she underlines.

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.

Aditi still didn’t have scale. Still didn’t have leverage. Still didn’t have the right to ask for what she was asking. So, she didn’t argue from the present. She argued from the future. “You can’t find another IKEA,” she told him. “There’s only one.”

Then she pushed it further. “But markets like India can create the next one.” She broke it down for him. His factory had capacity. IKEA filled a part of it. The rest was fragmented. “You won’t replace them,” she said. “But you can build another engine.” Not today but over time. “Give me the price that lets me compete. I’ll give you consistency,” was her pitch.

It wasn’t just confidence. It was a plan. He sat with it. Then he agreed.

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.

Years later, the question flips.

What happens when a Nestasia customer walks into an IKEA store?

Aditi doesn’t answer immediately. “We won’t lose what people feel about us,” she says. “That stays.” She pauses. “What we might lose is at a functional level—scale, range, maybe pricing in some cases.”

Then she shrugs. “We’re getting there.” And then: “They’ll still come back.” Because in the end, they weren’t just buying products. They were buying how it made their homes feel.