MAM
Honasa ropes in Yatish Bhargava as chief business officer to boost growth playbook
MUMBAI: Not every day does a personal care unicorn rope in an FMCG heavyweight to sharpen its business game—but when it does, the move smells as sweet as a bottle of onion hair oil going viral on Instagram.
Honasa Consumer Limited, the parent company behind Mamaearth, The Derma Co., and Aqualogica, announced on 17 June 2025 the appointment of Yatish Bhargava as its new chief business officer (CBO). The decision signals a strategic gear shift for the fast-growing brand, as it seeks to scale both breadth and depth across general trade, modern trade, and online marketplaces.
Bhargava steps into the role as a seasoned operator with over 17 years of experience. He brings P&L expertise and leadership acumen honed at some of India’s most influential consumer companies, including Flipkart and Hindustan Unilever. At Flipkart, he played a central role in category transformation and go-to-market strategies. At HUL, he led high-performing sales and growth teams across multiple verticals.
His appointment takes effect immediately, with a full-time term. Honasa stated that Bhargava will be a designated senior management personnel (SMP) under SEBI compliance.
In its regulatory filing with the NSE and BSE, Honasa underscored its intent to reinforce business scale, growth strategies, and sustainable momentum through Bhargava’s expertise. “Yatish has led category transformation, built scalable go-to-market strategies and driven sustained growth across diverse consumer businesses”, the company noted in its official statement.
An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, Bhargava will be tasked with building on Honasa’s already expansive omnichannel approach while navigating the highly competitive D2C landscape.
The announcement comes at a time when Honasa is increasingly eyeing market leadership across beauty and wellness categories, both online and offline. With Bhargava’s appointment, the company appears ready to play offence with stronger execution muscle and retail agility.
The disclosure has been made available on Honasa’s official website.
Brands
IICT partners with Gativedhi to bring studio production tools to students
New MoU lets students explore AI-driven production pipelines for AVGC-XR
MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) has teamed up with Gativedhi Technologies to give students a front-row seat to modern studio production. The collaboration will integrate Gativedhi’s AI-powered production intelligence platform, Shotrack, into academic programmes, letting students experience the workflow systems used by animation, VFX and gaming studios.
Under the MoU, faculty, students and researchers will get hands-on access to Shotrack through beta programmes, pilot deployments and academic evaluations. This will allow them to explore simulated production pipelines, understand asset management, track tasks and monitor schedules, essentially seeing how complex projects come together behind the scenes.
Shotrack is designed to tackle a key industry challenge: when multiple studios work on the same project, differing internal systems often create bottlenecks, slow approvals and complicate version control. The platform provides a unified production environment, enabling smoother collaboration across distributed teams while generating operational insights and predictive analytics to optimise crew allocation, forecast schedule risks and manage costs.
The collaboration also opens doors to Gativedhi’s wider ecosystem. Upcoming tools include StudioTrack, for studio operations management covering budgeting, recruitment and IT infrastructure, and WorkTrack, which measures workflow efficiency and team productivity across industries.
IICT plans to embed these tools into programmes covering animation pipelines, VFX workflows, gaming production and media project management. Students will also benefit from guest lectures, masterclasses, workshops, internships and research projects that connect academic learning with real-world studio practices.
IICT CEO Vishwas Deoskar, said the partnership provides “An environment where production pipeline tools can be explored, tested and refined while students gain insight into how large-scale productions are organised.”
Gativedhi Technologies founder & CEO Senthil Kumar added, “This collaboration introduces students to real-world studio management tools and helps us improve our platform with academic feedback.”
With Shotrack in classrooms, India’s future animators, VFX artists and gaming producers will get a taste of studio life long before they step into one.
