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On 3 September 2025, the GST Council cut the goods & services tax on daily-use personal care items, shampoos, toilet soap, toothpaste, from 18% to 5%, effective 22 September per the government's own release. A tax cut of that size is a price cut on every shelf in the country, & a year on it is showing up as volume demand across India's beauty & personal care aisles. At the same time, 10-minute delivery apps have quietly become the most brand-friendly shelf in Indian retail: a dark store carries a few hundred beauty products, not a few lakh, so the brands people search for by name keep winning space & the long tail gets squeezed out.
Well, hold that backdrop against a digital-first beauty & personal care house I've been studying this quarter. Its June 2026 quarter net profit more than doubled, up 119% year on year per its results filing, on 30.5% underlying volume growth, & its EBITDA margin jumped 636 basis points per its investor presentation. The part I sat with is that roughly 150 basis points of that margin jump came from a one-time accounting credit, a stock-option cost reversal that will not repeat, so the clean margin is nearer 12% than the 14% in the headline.
The company I'm referring to is