Parul Gulati: Building on her own terms

There is a point during the conversation when Parul Gulati stops speaking like an actor and starts sounding like a business executive.

The shift is subtle.

Until then, she is talking about auditions, moving to Mumbai at 16, studying acting in workshops instead of classrooms, and learning resilience through rejection. Then the conversation turns to building companies, ownership, scale and long-term ambition. Suddenly she is discussing why she is hesitant to raise external capital, why she prefers retaining control of her business and why she believes people should stop asking women to choose between multiple careers.

She brings up Ratan Tata.

Not because she wants to become India’s next business icon, she clarifies, but because she admires the idea of building institutions that extend far beyond a founder’s public identity.

“If I can do even 50% of what he did in his lifetime,” she says, “I would have lived.”

It is an unexpectedly expansive answer from someone most audiences first encountered as an actor.

Today, Gulati occupies a space that increasingly defines India’s creator economy: part entertainer, part entrepreneur, part operator. Over the years, audiences have watched her across television, Punjabi cinema, and streaming platforms through projects such as Girls Hostel, Selection Day and Made in Heaven, while a different audience discovered her as the founder of Nish Hair. But unlike many celebrity-led businesses that emerge after fame, Gulati’s entrepreneurial instinct appears to have developed alongside her acting career rather than after it.

That instinct, she believes, was shaped much earlier.

A small town, a bigger ambition

Gulati grew up in Rohtak, a small town in Haryana that looked very different when she was growing up than it does today. She describes herself as part of the last generation that remembers life before social media became central to everyday experience—when children spent more time observing people than consuming content.

Her childhood, she says, was ordinary. There are no dramatic stories of early performances or clear entrepreneurial signals. Her father worked at a courier company, handling courier bookings, while her mother initially stitched clothes from home for families in the neighbourhood before taking up a job as a receptionist at a diagnostic centre. Together, they created a conventional lower-middle-class household, and she grew up with her elder brother and a younger brother who later passed away.

Yet she believes those early years quietly shaped the way she sees the world. When resources are limited, she says, value feels different. Success feels different too.

“Coming from no money at all changes your relationship with ambition,” she says.

That ambition did not initially arrive in the form of business. Acting came first.

The making of an actor

At 16, Gulati moved to Mumbai after being picked for a role based on content she posted on Facebook—a path into the entertainment industry that sounds improbable today but became her entry point into an entirely new life. She says she was selected partly because of her resemblance to actor Yami Gautam, as she had been cast to play Gautam’s sister. Her mother moved to Mumbai two years later because Gulati was still too young to manage things entirely on her own.

She arrived young, without a roadmap, and with very little certainty about what would come next.

She enrolled in college through distance education but left during her second year after landing her first Punjabi film.

The decision did not feel reckless to her.

If acting had become her direction, she reasoned, then she should study acting seriously.

Over the years, she attended workshops at Adishakti in Puducherry after being encouraged by casting director Mukesh Chhabra, completed a summer programme at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and trained with actor and coach Saurabh Sachdeva, whom she now considers her mentor.

Unlike many actors who describe training as a way to improve performance, Gulati speaks about it as a way of understanding people.

Listening.

Observation.

Empathy.

Those ideas stayed with her long after she left the classroom.

Her acting career gradually expanded across television, films, and digital platforms, but she says acting remained an evolving craft rather than a destination she had already mastered.

In fact, she credits acting for teaching her how to build a company.

Actors, she says, are trained to listen carefully to what audiences feel. Businesses are built by listening carefully to what consumers need.

That connection became clearer once Nish Hair began evolving.

From auditions to entrepreneurship

If acting taught her observation, auditions taught her resilience.

For Gulati, rejection isn’t a chapter in the story. It is the story.

She remembers giving five auditions a day. Over the course of a year, the number would run into hundreds and eventually thousands.

Selections remained rare. She estimates that for every thousand auditions, she might have landed 10 or 12 opportunities. She says it matter-of-factly.

Not as hardship.

As training.

“You realise very early that rejection doesn’t mean no.”

That lesson would become central to both careers. Because by the time Nish Hair arrived, Gulati already knew how to keep building without immediate validation.

More than a side hustle

The company began not as a celebrity extension but as a problem she wanted to solve.

Initially positioned as a fashion accessories business, Nish Hair changed direction once customers began sharing deeper concerns.

Hair thinning.

Hair loss.

Confidence.

People wanted solutions, not styling. That feedback pushed the company into solving a more functional problem.

“The real pivot happened when consumers started speaking to us,” she says.

What followed was gradual expansion—direct-to-consumer first, then e-commerce, then quick commerce and eventually retail.

The company is now entering its tenth year. What started as a niche extensions business has since expanded into a wider hair solutions portfolio spanning extensions, toppers, wigs and hair accessories across online and offline channels. According to Gulati, Nish recorded revenue of around ₹50 crore in FY26 and has gradually expanded beyond its early direct-to-consumer model into marketplaces, quick commerce and retail. The company also operates a store in Dubai, which her elder brother helps manage.

Unlike many founder stories that emphasise speed and scale, Gulati speaks repeatedly about patience.

She has deliberately stayed cautious about fundraising and says she currently retains almost complete ownership of the business. Part of that decision is philosophical. She wants the freedom to build.

Investors, she says, often ask how she plans to focus on one thing while managing acting and business simultaneously.

She pushes back against the assumption.

Nobody asks large business leaders why they operate across sectors, she argues. Why should ambition become narrower for actors?

Her answer to scale is not to lose focus. It is expansion. She sees herself eventually building more businesses—perhaps in beauty, perhaps in hospitality, perhaps somewhere else entirely.

Because for Gulati, business is not ultimately about categories. It is about creation.

Learning to become the founder

That philosophy extends beyond products.

As Nish Hair grows, she says she has started thinking more seriously about leadership and accountability. Being the public face of the company means every criticism feels personal. She laughs while recalling moments when even minor operational issues somehow become reflections of the founder.

But behind the humour is a more serious question she is trying to answer: what kind of company does she want to build?

Her answer today includes employee support systems, training, healthier workplace culture, and learning how to delegate. She talks about introducing stronger systems, exploring access to therapy support, and creating a healthier environment for teams.

“I wasn’t born a businesswoman,” she says. “I became one.”

The idea of legacy

Ask her where she sees herself five years from now, and the answer becomes less financial and more directional.

She talks about expanding into hair wellness and eventually creating products around hair care and colour.

Then she mentions something else.

Cancer patients.

She does not know exactly what she wants to build yet, only that she wants to create something more meaningful than wigs. Something that genuinely helps.

Five years, she says, feels too short a timeline to define legacy. But perhaps it is enough time to begin building one.

And maybe that is what makes Parul Gulati interesting at this stage of her career.

She does not speak like someone trying to maximise fame. She speaks like someone trying to outgrow it.

Strip away the actor, the founder and the creator labels, and what remains is someone who still seems driven by the same thing that took her from Rohtak to Mumbai years ago: the desire to keep making things—characters, products, businesses and perhaps eventually institutions.

She doesn’t yet know what shape that future takes.

But she seems unusually certain that she has no intention of stopping at one.