India's new-age consumer brands are having a moment. Across categories such as snacks, skincare, jewellery and wearables, digital-first challengers are growing faster than established players and forcing large FMCG companies to rethink products, marketing and distribution. Yet beneath the excitement lies a striking contradiction. While these insurgent brands are proving they can disrupt markets, very few are succeeding in building enduring large-scale businesses.
A recent report by Bain & Company and DSG Consumer Partners captures this paradox starkly. India's insurgent consumer-brand ecosystem generated an estimated $7.5 billion in revenue in FY25, up from $2 billion five years ago. Many of these brands are growing more than three times faster than the markets they operate in. Yet less than 1% of consumer companies founded since 2008 have crossed Rs 100 crore in revenue. Among those that do, only 22% have managed to grow beyond Rs 500 crore. The numbers suggest that creating a challenger brand has become easier but building a consumer giant remains a daunting task.
Disruption is no longer the hard part
The report shows that insurgent brands are increasingly successful at identifying opportunities that larger companies either miss or respond to slowly. Consumers today are looking for products tailored to specific needs, whether that means healthier snacks, science-backed skincare, specialized jewellery offerings or products designed around emerging lifestyles.
This focus has allowed challenger brands to gain traction quickly. In beauty and personal care, insurgents have grown six times faster than the broader market over the last five years. In jewellery, they have expanded nearly 6.5 times faster than the category. Such growth rates would have been difficult to imagine a decade ago.
However, the challenge is that early success and long-term scale are not the same thing.
