General•4 min read
Discover anything
Reliance Retail has acquired Anomaly, the global haircare brand founded by actor and entrepreneur Priyanka Chopra Jonas — and in doing so, has made one of the most strategically significant moves in India’s beauty and personal care sector in recent memory. The transaction includes full ownership of Anomaly’s trademarks, brand assets, and digital properties. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal’s implications reach well beyond the balance sheet.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas will continue her involvement with the brand in a new role as Creative Director, overseeing innovation, brand vision, and product development. For a brand built on personal conviction and global ambition, that continuity of creative leadership matters — and it signals that Reliance is acquiring Anomaly as a living brand, not simply a portfolio asset to be absorbed and repackaged.
From Accessible American Shelves to India’s Largest Retail Network
Launched in 2021 by Chopra Jonas in partnership with beauty incubator Maesa, Anomaly quickly gained traction in the United States for its affordable, eco-conscious haircare products, with placement in major retail chains such as Target and Walmart. The brand’s shampoos, conditioners, hair masks, and styling products were marketed as vegan, cruelty-free, and sustainably packaged.
What Anomaly built in the US — accessibility, clean credentials, and genuine performance at an approachable price — translates directly to what India’s haircare consumer is increasingly demanding. Reliance Retail plans to leverage its omnichannel beauty platform Tira to expand Anomaly’s reach and improve consumer access across markets, while also developing products tailored specifically for local hair and scalp needs.
That last point is critical. India’s haircare needs — shaped by hard water, humidity, heat styling habits, and diverse hair textures — are distinct from the US market Anomaly was originally formulated for. A locally adapted product strategy, backed by Reliance’s consumer data and distribution depth, could unlock a meaningfully different scale of adoption.
The Reliance Beauty Play
This acquisition doesn’t exist in isolation. It is the latest move in a deliberate, accelerating strategy to build Reliance Retail into India’s dominant force in beauty and personal care. Isha Ambani, Executive Director of Reliance Retail Ventures Limited, described bringing Anomaly into the portfolio as a strategic step in expanding their basket of new-age, high-growth beauty brands.
Reliance Retail’s network spans over 20,000 stores alongside digital channels — an infrastructure that gives any brand it acquires an immediate, unmatched route to Indian consumers at scale. Combined with Tira, its dedicated beauty platform, Reliance now has the offline footprint, digital commerce capability, and brand portfolio depth to compete seriously with Nykaa for India’s beauty consumer.
The Anomaly acquisition adds a global, celebrity-founded, clean haircare brand to that arsenal — and does so at a moment when India’s premium haircare segment is expanding rapidly.
What Priyanka Chopra Jonas Brings Beyond Her Name
Celebrity brand acquisitions live and die by what happens after the announcement. The risk is always the same: the celebrity steps back, brand identity dilutes, and what was distinctive becomes generic.
Anomaly is structurally positioned to avoid that outcome. Priyanka Chopra Jonas described the acquisition as a defining moment — noting that what began as a deeply personal journey has grown into a brand with real purpose and global ambition, and that she is especially excited to be working alongside Isha Ambani in her new role as Creative Director.
That framing — of continued personal investment rather than an exit — matters for brand equity. Consumers who chose Anomaly because of authentic alignment with its values need confidence that those values survive the acquisition. Chopra Jonas’s ongoing creative stewardship provides that assurance in a way that a purely financial transaction couldn’t.
International Expansion and the Global Ambition
Reliance Retail has stated that Anomaly will continue to grow its international presence in markets including North America, the United Kingdom, and the Middle East. This is not a brand being brought home and domesticated — it is being scaled globally with Reliance’s infrastructure behind it.
For India’s beauty industry, that global ambition is itself significant. An Indian retail conglomerate acquiring a globally positioned, celebrity-founded haircare brand and using it as a vehicle for international expansion represents a meaningful shift in how Indian companies are approaching beauty — not as importers of global trends, but as exporters of globally relevant brands.
What This Means for India’s Beauty Market
The Reliance-Anomaly deal accelerates several trends simultaneously: the premiumization of Indian haircare, the mainstreaming of clean and vegan beauty credentials, and the consolidation of India’s beauty retail landscape around a small number of very large, very well-resourced players.
For independent and D2C beauty brands, the message is clear. Distribution scale and brand acquisition are becoming the primary competitive weapons in India’s beauty market. The brands that build genuine consumer equity — through product performance, ingredient transparency, and authentic identity — will attract the partnerships and capital needed to scale. Those that don’t will increasingly find themselves competing for shelf space and attention against brands backed by Reliance’s 20,000-store network.
Anomaly’s journey from a US retail launch to an acquisition by India’s largest retailer is, in many ways, the beauty playbook distilled: start with a clear consumer insight, build around it with genuine product conviction, create a global identity, and scale with the right partner at the right moment.
Reliance just became that partner. India’s haircare market will look different for it.
