Honasa Consumer Limited, the beauty and personal care company behind Mamaearth and a clutch of newer brands, has elevated Nishchay Bahl to Chief Business Officer – Offline. In the expanded role, Bahl will run the company’s entire offline business across General Trade, Modern Trade and other channels, with a brief to speed up growth, widen distribution and push the visibility of Honasa’s brands across markets and categories.
From SVP to CBO in three years
Bahl steps up after nearly three years as Senior Vice President – Offline Revenue at the Gurugram-headquartered company. In that stint, he was central to scaling Honasa’s offline footprint, deepening ties with trade partners and extending distribution into new markets.
He has also been closely associated with Project Neev, Honasa’s programme to strengthen its General Trade business through sharper market execution, better partner engagement and a renewed focus on distribution — a reminder that for a digital-first beauty company, the kirana counter is now as strategic as the product detail page.
Announcing the elevation, co-founder and CEO Varun Alagh said the company believes in “building leaders from within”, adding that Bahl’s mix of strategic thinking and execution, along with his grasp of Honasa’s brands, consumers and the trade ecosystem, had been instrumental in the offline turnaround.
Bahl, in his own comments, described the last three years as a transformative phase in which the fundamentals of General Trade and Modern Trade were strengthened and the distribution network rebuilt. His stated priorities from here: gaining category share, widening the distribution footprint, and improving availability and visibility, alongside deepening presence in priority markets and lifting outlet productivity.
Who is Nishchay Bahl
- Over 17 years of experience across FMCG and consumer businesses.
- Expertise spanning sales, commercial strategy, go-to-market execution, General Trade, Modern Trade, e-commerce and business development.
- Previously Chief Business Officer – Offline at The Good Glamm Group.
- Earlier at Reckitt as E-commerce Director – South Asia, leading the regional e-commerce agenda, with prior leadership roles at Reckitt and Britannia Industries.
- An alumnus of the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, and St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.
Why this appointment matters
The elevation is a signal about where growth is expected to come from for India’s digital-first consumer brands. A generation of D2C companies built scale on marketplaces, performance media and influencer marketing. But as customer acquisition costs climbed and online growth normalised, the same brands began chasing shelf space — first in Modern Trade and quick commerce, and then in the much harder, much larger General Trade universe.
Honasa’s move to create a dedicated CBO – Offline mandate, and to fill it internally, indicates that offline is no longer a side experiment but a core P&L engine. It also underlines the profile employers are hunting for right now: leaders who understand both distributor economics and digital commerce. Bahl’s CV — e-commerce leadership at Reckitt, channel roles at Britannia, offline leadership at The Good Glamm Group — is exactly that hybrid.
What marketers should take away
For brand and growth teams watching this beat, three practical prompts:
Availability is a marketing metric. Awareness campaigns underperform when the product is not on the shelf in the towns where the media is running. Outlet productivity and numeric distribution deserve a place on the marketing dashboard, not just the sales one.
Name your offline push. Internal programmes like Project Neev matter because they give distributors, field teams and agency partners a single story to rally around. Ambiguous “omnichannel” ambitions rarely translate into execution.
Plan media for the trade, not just the consumer. As offline share grows, regional media, retail visibility and in-store assets start competing with performance budgets for attention. Brands that sort this allocation debate early tend to scale distribution faster.
For Honasa, which has been rebuilding its distribution architecture after a challenging phase in trade, the next test will be whether the offline base can deliver what Bahl calls sustained, profitable growth — the phrase every listed consumer company is being measured against.
Source: MediaNews4U
