Long before the pandemic pushed salons to offer at-home services, women worldwide were craving them, not for safety, but for convenience. At-home alternatives — few and far between a decade ago — promised convenience but often fell short on quality, hygiene and transparency. Products came in unmarked bottles. The tools looked dubious. And pricing was negotiated on the spot.

Essentially, home salon services saw the same flaw persist for years: A striking lack of standardisation. The quality of beauty and wellness offerings leaned heavily on individual excellence rather than replicating processes that would guarantee best outcomes all the time. Rising operating costs and an informal workforce only deepened the cracks.

In December 2016, Mayank and Aditya Arya, mariners-turned-entrepreneurs, confronted this broken system firsthand. When their spouses developed painful skin irritations after a botched beauty service, the Arya brothers realised that quality lapses had spread through the home salon market and it was ripe for disruption. That’s how the idea for Yes Madam was born.

“We saw an unserved middle segment — urban, value-seeking customers priced out of premium salons but dissatisfied with local parlours,” said cofounder and CEO, Aditya Arya. “Our pitch is simple: Make beauty and wellness services affordable, reliable and easy to book.”

The Noida-based beauty tech startup launched in December 2016 to deliver salon-quality services at home. By 2019, the brothers roped in a third cofounder, Akanksha Vishnoi, a Symbiosis Law School graduate with a flair for branding and marketing.

India’s overall beauty salon market reached $11.6 Bn in 2024 and is projected to hit $23 Bn by 2033, at a CAGR of 7.8%, according to Custom Market Insights. Although home salon services, a subset of this broader market, are riding the wave of the on-demand everything economy, standalone data for this segment remains scarce. Nevertheless, global patterns provide a useful proxy: Mobile and at-home salon services combined account for roughly 10% of the total salon market worldwide. Applied to India, that combined segment could have been worth around $1.2 Bn in 2024 and would potentially double by 2033.

Yes Madam operates in this space, providing premium services, including salon and spa at home for both male and female customers, along with laser treatments, high-end facial, makeup, as well as pre-bridal packages, and more for its female customers. It is part of a startup cohort that bets on standardising quality in the fragmented beauty and personal care services sector, where inconsistent training, hygiene gaps and pricing opacity have historically deterred customers from booking home visits.

The landscape, however, is getting more crowded by the day. Yes Madam is up against a growing pool of players such as Urban Company, a competitor with strong brand recall and deep pockets, along with emerging rivals like GetLook, Swagmee, and GlamCode.

Yes Madam shot into the limelight after its appearance on Shark Tank India Season 3. The deal didn’t go through eventually, but the visibility was instant, website traffic jumped nearly 10x, and the user base tripled, giving the brand significant momentum across India.

The platform also experienced strong revenue growth, from INR........

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