After building one of the earliest caffeine-led personal care brands in India, Pep Brands’ Tarun Sharma wasn’t looking to replicate mCaffeine’s formula. What he was interested in was reusing the machinery.
Hyphen, the skincare brand Sharma launched in 2023 alongside 5 co-founders, including Vaishali Gupta and actor Kriti Sanon, isn’t just another celebrity-fronted brand in a saturated D2C market. It’s an attempt to put existing infrastructure, R&D labs, distribution playbooks, and consumer data to more efficient use.
The global skincare market is expected to generate $198.35 billion in revenue in 2025, with a projected CAGR of 3.53% from 2025 to 2030, as per Statista. Hyphen posted a net loss of Rs 7.22 crore in FY24, compared to Rs 1.95 crore the previous year, according to regulatory filings by Tofler. The company reported Rs 7.53 crore in revenue from operations during the year, marking its first year of significant topline income.
“mCaffeine is an outcome of the capability Pep Brands has built. Hyphen is a product of the same system—deep R&D, data-driven distribution, and robust supply chains,” Sharma told financialexpress.com. If mCaffeine grew by chasing a whitespace in the body care segment, Hyphen is trying to capitalise on the spillover from it: face care consumers whose needs didn’t map neatly onto mCaffeine’s proposition. “Our same consumers have face care needs or skin care needs. mCaffeine might not be the best answer to those things.”
Hyphen was launched with just over 3 SKUs. That has now expanded to 30. But Sharma insists that restraint is strategic. “We would want to be very selective with our launches… not big fans of having, you know, hundreds of SKUs.” The early results are surprising even to him. “We were aiming for Rs 200 crore in the first year and Rs 500 crore by 2027. We’re already running at an annualised gross revenue of Rs 400 crore,” Sharma said.
But early scale doesn’t guarantee staying power in India’s hypercompetitive skincare market, where consumers have warmed up to active-led formulations, but continue to associate credibility with brands like The Ordinary or Minimalist. Sharma bets that Hyphen’s formulation philosophy, a mix of actives and naturals, will offer a middle path to a growing cohort of “dabblers”: consumers toggling between Ayurveda and science, without full conviction in either. “Science was scary for them. And nature was suspicious. That ‘how much neem is there in my neem?’ question kept coming up,” he explained.
Borrowing from the past, tweaking for speed
Hyphen isn’t a fresh start so much as a second iteration of a now-refined operating playbook. The company is deliberately recycling learnings from its first brand, correcting for past errors rather than chasing novelty. “We have not done things differently. We have just made sure that the number of mistakes we made at mCaffeine is not being repeated at Hyphen,” Sharma said. “A mistake once is a mistake, second time it’s a crime.”
That includes how the brand was architected from the ground up. The company opted for a “celebrity-anchored, operator-led” model, unlike the typical D2C formula where the celebrity’s face (and following) stands in for brand equity. Sanon was made Chief Customer Officer with a defined role, KPIs, and regular review meetings. “We told her that we don’t want your name or face. We would want you to work in this brand.”
Hyphen’s bold visual identity, bright neon packaging in a sea of white minimalist bottles, also emerged from that collaborative model. Sharma narrated that the now-signature yellow hue was cut from a dress Sanon wore to a design meeting in a bid that highlighted the brand’s refusal to look like a pharmaceutical brand, even if its products rely on some of the same science.
Still, the move wasn’t without risk. The science-first skincare category, while booming, is prone to short consumer cycles, competitive cloning, and fragmentation. Sharma acknowledges the consumer’s fickle loyalty. “Adoption lies in the kind of top line we can do and the kind of repeat we can do.” He claims 50–60% of Hyphen’s revenue is already from repeat customers, an unusually high number for a brand barely a year old.
A brand for whom, exactly?
The product itself is designed for a precise demographic: predominantly women aged 20–28, but with a growing interest from young men. “The maximum cohort is 20–28, where 80% of our sales come in. While most of them are females, about 17–18% would come from males as well,” Sharma noted.
The distribution strategy, however, follows the same model as its predecessor: online-first, D2C-heavy, and built on control over first-party data. “More than half of our revenue comes from D2C,” Sharma said, “which gives us customer control and destiny control for the future.”
But Hyphen is still a long way from category dominance. The face care market is valued between Rs 30,000–40,000 crore, and Sharma is clear-eyed about Hyphen’s place in it. “We’re hardly anything,” he said. “Now the challenge is how do we keep up with the pace?” The pace may be new. The machinery, clearly, is not.