For as long as Anshita Mehrotra can remember, conversations at her home were all about cosmetic formulations, ingredients, and consumer behaviour. For Mehrotras, beauty wasn’t just another industry but a family business.
Her mother, Shailey Malhotra, had built Fixderma into one of India’s trusted skincare brands, serving millions of consumers. And the obvious path for Anshita was to step into an already successful business.
Instead, she chose a road less trodden.
After graduating in Canada and returning to India in 2018, Mehrotra began exploring a gap in the beauty market that’s worth tapping into. And it didn’t take long to find one. Like millions of Indians with naturally curly hair, she knew the daily struggle of keeping her textured hair hydrated.
The products available in the market largely revolved around oils, which moisturised but often left hair greasy and difficult to manage. There was little available that could hydrate curls, style them, be used daily, and still feel light and smell good. The market was dominated by expensive salon-grade products that were not suitable for daily use.
“There was no curl cream or shampoo for hair like mine. The market simply didn’t exist, and there was a huge unmet need staring us in the face, and I knew I could build in that space,” Anshita Mehrotra, founder of Fix My Curls, told Inc42.
Having grown up around the beauty industry, she understood the product development process, knew the experts she needed to work with, and had access to manufacturing capabilities.
After almost eight months working with hair care specialists, she developed what she says was the category’s first leave-in curl cream and hair gel specifically for the Indian market. The products were free from sulfates, silicones, parabens, mineral oils, and drying alcohols, and promised an everyday styling routine.
In 2019, Mehrotra launched Fix My Curls through its own website, followed by an Amazon listing. But just as the business was finding its footing, the pandemic brought the industry, like much of the world, to a standstill.
“It was a difficult year for sales. But with everyone spending more time on their phones, I realised that if I couldn’t get the product into their hands, I could at least help them understand why they needed it,” Mehrotra said, sharing that within the first lockdown, her educational content led the brand to gain over 12,000 active followers on Instagram.
After 2021, Fix My Curls began operating independently of Fixderma and expanded its presence across beauty-focussed marketplaces such as Nykaa, Vanity Wagon, and Sublime Life. According to Mehrotra, that was when the brand found its first real product-market fit. And the next chapter of growth began with a bet on quick commerce.
Fix My Curls first entered quick commerce in the second half of 2023 with a limited rollout across a handful of Blinkit pin codes. We were trying to reach out to a new customer base that ordered more frequently.
“We were among the first personal care brands to bet on quick commerce. It was challenging because neither Blinkit nor we had a playbook. We were figuring out purchase orders and operations as we went,” Mehrotra told Inc42.
The breakthrough came in January 2024, when Blinkit expanded the brand’s presence nationwide. And by then, Mehrotra’s years of educating consumers online had created a loyal audience that was ready to buy.
Today, quick commerce is among the largest contributors to Fix My Curls’ total sales. Marketplaces and quick commerce account for nearly 70% of the brand’s total sales, while its D2C website contributes around 25%. The remaining 5% comes from exports to markets including Nepal, Switzerland, Malaysia and Romania.
While Fix My Curls reported revenue of over ₹21.42 Cr in FY25, it is yet to turn profitable. According to Mehrotra, the company expects to achieve EBITDA profitability of 2-5% in FY27.
As it works toward that goal, quick commerce is increasingly emerging as a profitable channel, and during our conversation, Mehrotra shared the lessons she learned over the last three years of building in quick commerce that helped the brand crack the channel.
Overcoming Q-Comm Challenges
According to Mehrotra, the initial few months in 2023 were challenging. The team was trying to identify the right hero product, determine its pricing, and decide which cities to launch in first.
Because the category was new to the platform, Blinkit had no historical data to show which products would sell, how often they would need replenishment, or what consumer behaviour to expect.
But now that the company is three years into quick-commerce operations, it has a clear list of dos and don’ts.
Building For Q-Comm Cart Behaviour
Without a proven framework, Fix My Curls leaned back on its most trusted signal: customer data. Fix My Curls used performance metrics from its hero SKUs on Amazon and its website to decide which products to list first on Blinkit. It also ran self-funded Meta campaigns to spread awareness that they were now available on Q-comm, too.
“We would make ads just to tell people that our products were available on Blinkit. Nobody asked us to do it. We did it because we knew we needed to increase awareness,” Mehrotra said.
But the brand soon realised that the channel was highly price sensitive. Blinkit users weren’t necessarily willing to spend ₹700-₹800 on haircare while ordering groceries. Cart context and purchase intent were fundamentally different.
“We realised that if somebody is adding groceries worth ₹1,000 to ₹1,500, our product needs to feel like an easy addition to that cart,” Mehrotra explained.
In response, Fix My Curls designed smaller trial and travel packs priced between ₹150 and ₹300, which helped the brand sell quickly and maintain smaller but frequent POs.
Catching Replenishment Rhythm
For Fix My Curls, Q-comm widened execution challenges that didn’t exist in traditional ecommerce. Mehrotra noted that, unlike ecommerce channels, where inventory cycles are relatively predictable, quick commerce operates on tight replenishment windows of just four to seven days.
“The biggest thing we struggled with was that we just weren’t able to fulfil purchase orders fast enough,” Mehrotra said.
To deal with this, Mehrotra built a dedicated quick commerce function. One team member was assigned exclusively to the channel and is responsible for tracking SKU-level demand daily and maintaining inventory buffers above projected needs. The brand also began closely monitoring daily run rates and planning inventory 15% to 20% above forecasts.
However, according to Mehrotra, inventory planning continues to be tested during new product launches, when demand can far exceed projections. She recalled that the quick commerce version of the Milky Leave-In Serum sold out almost immediately after launch, forcing the company to place “three separate purchase orders in quick succession” to keep up with demand.
Mehrotra also shared that getting POs delivered on time to fulfilment centres was another critical factor, as larger logistics partners, she found, were often too stretched across clients to handle Fix My Curls’ tight replenishment cycles.
Smaller logistics partners, however, proved more responsive and reliable. “The biggest thing is that you cannot miss your purchase order, and to make sure you don’t, you have to find the right logistics partner,” she added.
Building For Q-Comm’s Search Intent
Eventually, Mehrotra also realised that quick commerce shoppers were fundamentally different in their shopping habits. Unlike Instagram or a brand website, where consumers often come with a specific intent, quick commerce is driven largely by searching for a specific product.
“People were not searching for Fix My Curls. They were searching for products like shampoo, gel or dry shampoo,” she said.
To accommodate that insight into the product, Fix My Curls worked with quick commerce partners to shape the final form of their dry shampoo. The data showed that customers on the channel wanted travel-friendly haircare, so the brand launched a version that was compact, competitively priced, and under 100 ml.
According to the founder, these minor product changes drastically impacted sales, and the company now works closely with quick commerce platforms while developing new products.
Fix My Curls’ experience reflects a wider discovery challenge for haircare brands on quick commerce. Being available on a platform is only the first step. How consistently products remain in stock, where they appear in search results, how much shelf visibility they receive and how their prices compare with competitors can also influence their chances of discovery.
Future Growth For Fix My Curls’ Q-Comm Journey
For Mehrotra, the biggest takeaway from Fix My Curls’ quick commerce journey is that the channel is far more than a convenience-led delivery mechanism. It is increasingly becoming a discovery engine.
“Quick commerce has helped us reach cities that I genuinely have never targeted. To be honest, I’ve not even heard about some of these cities. Reaching tier-III markets at this scale is remarkable because, in our category, achieving such deep penetration used to be nearly impossible,” said Mehrotra.
In many ways, quick commerce has helped Fix My Curls solve the same challenge it faced when it first launched in 2019: making an underserved category more accessible.
As the company works towards EBITDA profitability and its next phase of product-market fit, Mehrotra believes the opportunity in quick commerce remains significant. However, she is equally convinced that the channel will not be able to accommodate every brand that enters it.
“I think the next two years will be a boom, but there’s going to be a clean-out after that. In every category, only the players who can move products, replenish inventory and build genuine demand will survive,” she said.
For Fix My Curls, the focus now is on ensuring it remains one of those players. After spending its early years building a category from scratch and its recent years building a quick commerce playbook, the brand is now entering a new chapter centred on scale, profitability and deeper penetration across India.
The post How Fix My Curls Built Its Quick Commerce Engine From Scratch appeared first on Inc42 Media.