Layoffs Continue: Mensa Brands Fires Employees From Recently-Acquired India Lifestyle Network

House of brands unicorn Mensa Brands has laid off around 30 employees from India Lifestyle Network (ILN), which it acquired in December last year.

A spokesperson of Mensa Brands told Inc42 in a statement, “ILN is committed to providing the best content to its consumers and industry-leading services to its client partners. To enhance efficiency post integration, we restructured some teams that impacted a few positions. This activity affected less than 30 team members in ILN.” 

“We are fully dedicated to supporting those affected by providing each of them up to three months salary, extended health insurance, and support in finding new roles,” the statement added.

Moneycontrol was the first to report the development of mass firing at Mensa Brands but pegged the affected number of employees at 200. People aware of the development told the publication that the layoffs happened across divisions, with ILN being the most affected one.

However, the Mensa Brands spokesperson rejected the report and said there have been no other layoffs except at ILN. 

As per the publication’s report, ILN employees were “called for a one-on-one session with the human resource (HR) executives and were asked to leave the very next day”. 

“While some employees were fortunate enough to get two months’ pay as compensation, a chunk of them were paid only one month’s salaries and asked to leave immediately. Employees were asked to go because their personal performance was suddenly unsatisfactory for Mensa, which admitted that ILN’s growth has been lackluster,” the report cited a person aware of the development as saying. 

Founded in 2021 by former Myntra CEO Ananth Narayanan, Mensa Brands acquires digital-first startups and then helps them scale. It acquired ILN, the parent entity of MensXP, iDiva, and Hypp, from Times Internet for an undisclosed amount to further develop its brand-building capabilities.

Mensa Brands is backed by the likes of Prosus, Tiger Global, Accel Partners, Alpha Wave, and CRED’s Kunal Shah, among others. The company has more than 700 employees and as per its LinkedIn page, it is also hiring aggressively right now.

In the first full year of its operation in FY22, Mensa Brands posted a net loss of INR 96.62 Cr and operating revenue of INR 186.15 Cr.

Amid the ongoing funding winter and growing focus on achieving profitability, Indian startups have let go of around 27,000 employees since 2022, as per Inc42’s layoff tracker.

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