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July 27, 2026
Vaeshnavi Kasthuril, MINT
Bengaluru, 27 Jul 2026
Over the past six years, Trent Ltd has grown its revenue more than fivefold, outpacing Titan Co. Ltd, Tata Consumer Products Ltd (TCPL) and Voltas Ltd to become the fastest-growing established company in Tata Sons’ consumer and retail portfolio.
Trent, incorporated in 1998, is the youngest among the Tata group’s four major listed consumer businesses. Voltas was incorporated in 1954, TCPL traces its origins to Tata Tea, established in 1962, while Titan was incorporated in 1984.
While Titan remains the group’s largest consumer business by revenue, Trent has overtaken Voltas and nearly caught up with TCPL.
Trent’s revenue rose to ₹20,189 crore in FY26 from ₹3,635 crore in FY20, showed Tata Sons’ FY26 annual report. In comparison, Titan’s revenue expanded 4.2 times, while TCPL and Voltas grew 2.1 times and 1.8 times, respectively. Six years ago, Trent accounted for just 8.6% of the combined revenue of the group’s four major consumer businesses. In FY26, that share has climbed to 14.1%, close to TCPL’s 14.3%.
Trent’s portfolio includes Westside and Zudio in fashion, Samoh and Burnt Toast in newer lifestyle formats, and Star in grocery retail.
Zudio effect
The growth has been driven by Trent’s aggressive expansion across value and premium fashion. Zudio has emerged as the retailer’s biggest growth engine, benefiting from rising demand for affordable fashion among middle-income consumers, while Westside has continued to strengthen its presence in the premium apparel and lifestyle segment.
Zudio has been “a phenomenal driver of revenue growth”, with the retailer aggressively expanding the format over the past few years, said Devangshu Dutta, founder of retail consulting firm Third Eyesight.
He said Trent has also benefited from a structural shift in the country’s retail landscape as consumers increasingly move from fragmented, unorganised markets to organised retail. “The conversion from informal to formal happens not so much driven by demand but by availability. So if you open a new outlet… you have something which was not there earlier, which becomes a magnet for footfall,” Dutta said.
He said that Zudio’s combination of fashion-led products and sharp pricing has helped it stand out in the crowded value apparel market.
The retailer has simultaneously expanded beyond apparel into adjacent categories such as beauty and personal care, home décor, footwear, and accessories through Westside, while also nurturing newer concepts, including Samoh, Burnt Toast, and Star.
During FY26, Trent added 289 stores, taking its total network to 1,286 outlets across 321 cities and expanding its retail footprint to more than 17.7 million sq. ft.
The company said it sees opportunities to increase store density in existing markets while expanding into new cities, particularly as demand for organized retail continues to deepen beyond the country’s largest metropolitan areas.
The next phase of growth is likely to be driven by Westside. According to media reports, Trent plans to significantly accelerate the expansion of its flagship premium fashion chain by opening up to 100 stores annually, nearly double its historical pace. The chain, which had 300 stores at the end of FY26, is expected to expand into newer geographies, including the northeastern states, while strengthening its presence in key metropolitan markets.
Dutta said macroeconomic uncertainty, including the impact of geopolitical tensions and softer employment conditions, could weigh on discretionary spending. “If there is uncertainty, then you tend to be a little bit more careful,” he said.
Dutta said that while consumer demand may fluctuate in the short term, the long-term shift towards modern retail remains firmly intact.
Noel Tata’s farewell message
The FY26 annual report also carries Noel Tata’s final message as chairman of Trent, marking the end of an era for the retailer he helped transform into one of India’s largest fashion retailers.
Tata reiterated his long-held ambition of building Trent into a platform capable of creating and scaling multiple consumer businesses rather than relying on a single retail format. “I have long believed that Trent is not intended to be defined by a single brand, but rather by a portfolio of brands,” he wrote, adding that Westside, Zudio and Star continue to have significant runway for growth.
Looking ahead, he said Trent should aspire to build Indian brands with global relevance and generate a material share of revenues from overseas markets.
He also recalled his vision, first articulated in 2023, of making Trent ten times larger in terms of revenue with commensurate profitability, noting that the company’s revenue and profitability run rate have already grown more than 2.5 times since then.
The company has not yet named a successor to Noel Tata, who is set to retire as chairman in November.
(Published in MINT)
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July 13, 2026
Sowmya Ramasubramanian, Vaeshnavi Kasthuril (MINT)
Bengaluru, 13 July 2026
India’s vertical quick-commerce startups across categories like baby care, medicines and fashion, backed by venture capital heavyweights, are beginning to redefine what “quick” means.
For some, the race is no longer about cutting delivery times by a few more minutes. Instead, founders are increasingly talking about better assortment, sharper curation, stronger supply chains and healthier unit economics as the factors that will decide whether the model survives.
Baby care platform Ozi, backed by Blume Ventures and RTP Global, has settled on a roughly 60-minute delivery promise. Founder Amit Sah told Mint the company would rather optimise for “quality selection” than chase ultra-fast deliveries, arguing that customers today are looking for reliable availability and curated choices rather than insisting on receiving products in 10 minutes.
Lightspeed-backed fashion startup Slikk is pursuing a similar path. Founder Akshay Gulati said the company’s focus since inception has been building a wide catalogue rather than aggressively acquiring users.
The shift comes as the sector enters a more pragmatic phase. Quick fashion startup Blip shut down within a year of launch last June, while rival Klydo has recently pivoted its business model, raising questions about the viability of firms in every category.
The crop of vertical quick commerce startups—focused on rapid delivery within a single, specific product category—has largely emerged over the past two years, inspired by the explosive growth of grocery-focused pioneers such as Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and IPO-bound Zepto, which have accustomed consumers to receiving groceries and everyday essentials within minutes.
Other prominent startups include Plazza for quick delivery of medicines, Instafix for mobile repairs within minutes, and Dazzl for at-home salon services.
Kalaari Capital noted in its 2025 report that quick commerce had already captured about two-thirds of online grocery orders and around 10% of India’s overall e-retail spending in 2024, transforming consumer behaviour and building the infrastructure for specialised vertical players to emerge.
“Speed was never a real moat but became a hygiene factor once every significant player could promise 10-30 minute delivery,” said Devangshu Dutta, founder and chief executive of consultancy Third Eyesight. “Assortment depth, availability, trust, and sustained price-value have been, and will remain, the true differentiation levers. For categories such as medicines and baby products, credibility and compliance outweigh saved minutes, apart from urgent purchases.”
“Unit economics can become healthier only where there’s a clear reason for frequent and repeated purchases. Groceries and medicines are repeat, low consideration categories, while fashion is high consideration, driven by fit, styling and browsing. The best quick commerce categories have low or no returns and high order frequency, whereas rapid fashion delivery faces high return rates due to product mismatch against customer expectations (sizing, fit, fabric and colour),” Dutta said.
Different categories, different playbooks
While fashion startups are investing heavily in discovery and inventory refreshes, Ozi believes the opportunity in baby care lies in curation and premiumisation.
Sah said each sub-category within baby care presents a different operational challenge. Consumables require deep availability of long-tail brands, while fashion depends on filtering products for quality rather than listing everything available. Ozi, which delivers wipes, diapers, and baby food, deliberately curates brands instead of maximising assortment, targeting parents willing to pay slightly more for trusted products.
“The customer behaviour has shifted from discovery first to search first,” Sah said, adding that shoppers today are not necessarily looking for ultra-fast delivery, but nor are they willing to wait several days. “A modern-age customer values quality. They are happy to pay an 8-10% or 12% differential, but they need quicker access to better brands and better assortment.”
Fashion startups argue that their challenge is different altogether.
Gulati said Slikk has built its business around supply rather than customer acquisition, claiming that stronger assortment has helped steadily reduce acquisition costs. The company replaces 30-40% of inventory in every dark store each month and is expanding neighbourhood by neighbourhood instead of spreading rapidly across cities.
Slikk might also consider introducing private brands for apparel, given their higher margins, Gulati said.
Bengaluru-based fast-fashion e-commerce startup Knot, which raised $5 million from 12 Flags and Kae Capital in December 2025, is investing heavily in back-end technology. Its app captures user preferences through swipe-based interactions, while its dark stores carry much wider assortments than horizontal quick commerce operators – offering a vast, multi-category collection of goods – and customise inventory based on local demand.
“We look at fashion as a data science problem and not really an intuition problem,” co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Archit Nanda said.
Nanda said fashion’s long-tail nature—which relies on selling small quantities of several unique products rather than depending on a few popular items – means inventory commonality across dark stores is significantly lower than grocery, requiring specialised supply chains and hyperlocal merchandising.
The profitability test
The changing strategies also reflect growing investor scrutiny of unit economics.
Slikk’s Gulati said investors continue to back the category but increasingly want proof that businesses can balance growth with profitability rather than relying on heavy customer acquisition spending. He believes execution in neighbourhood-level operations, assortment and brand partnerships will ultimately determine the winner.
Knot’s Nanda said that fashion combines high average order values with healthy margins, making the category attractive despite its complexity.
However, analysts believe that not every vertical is equally suited to the model.
“Looking ahead, horizontal cross-subsidy will work better, with established, well-capitalised players (Myntra’s M-Now, Nykaa Now) including quick delivery into an existing catalogue and logistics network rather than building it standalone. For narrow, high-trust verticals (medicines, baby care) where the value is availability and authenticity rather than impulse, and where margins can support the delivery cost, quick commerce can work,” Dutta noted.
Kalaari Capital’s 2025 report on vertical quick commerce similarly argued that specialised players will win by solving category-specific pain points, with assortment depth, customer experience, and category expertise emerging as key differentiators.
(Published in MINT)
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July 12, 2026
Nivedita Mookerji, Business Standard
12 Jul 2026
Recently, fast moving consumer goods distributors posed some existential questions to the government: Have the rules changed for foreign-owned ecommerce firms? With that, the All India Consumer Products Distribution Federation made a plea to the government to examine if foreign-funded ecommerce and quick commerce players can run inventory-led businesses through warehouses and dark stores.
The question mark is around the operating model of the big daddies of retail — both from America — under the current foreign direct investment (FDI) guidelines. One of them is Bentonville-headquartered Walmart, which holds a controlling stake in e-commerce major Flipkart. And the other is Seattle-based Amazon. Both Flipkart and Amazon are upping their quick commerce play, a development that the Indian retail ecosystem players fear would hit them hard.
For context, foreign e-commerce companies are allowed to do business through the marketplace model as opposed to the inventory-led format. Marketplace operators such as Amazon and Flipkart (Walmart) are permitted to have sellers on their platforms and those sellers own the goods (inventory) which are sold to customers. Indian companies in the e-commerce business can own the goods and sell them directly to the consumers.
This is not the first time that there’s noise around the business practices of foreign majors and their alleged violations of the rulebook in relation to anything from the legality of the operating model to predatory pricing and deep discounting. The protests of the domestic traders against foreign players — that started decades ago with an agitation against the government’s multi-brand retail policy — have resulted in a series of amendments in the FDI rules, intervention of the competition watchdog CCI (Competition Commission of India), Supreme Court observations, making of laws and keeping them in abeyance. But, the complaints — from different quarters of the domestic business — have remained.
Devangshu Dutta, founder and CEO of consulting firm Third Eyesight, argued that since 1996-97, when foreign investment in retail was first banned, governments of different political hues have been walking the regulatory tightrope with respect to foreign investment in retail, whether offline or online. “The government’s caution on retail policy was aimed at protecting domestic interests, though it is arguable whether it was for the small retailer, or the larger corporates who had identified this as a growth sector at the time,’’ Dutta said.
(Published in Business Standard)
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June 22, 2026
Sharleen D’souza & Shivani Shinde, Business Standard
Mumbai, 21 June 2026
Online beauty marketplaces Reliance Retail Ventures’ Tira and Nykaa have a common mantra: growing in-house brands. Successful brand acquisitions and margin growth seem to fuel the push.
“With private labels, margins are better. It also helps both companies plug the gap in the market which other brands are not present in,” Devangshu Dutta, chief executive officer (CEO) of Third Eyesight, told Business Standard. Within in-house brands, products need some investment in research and development (R&D), he explained.
Harish Bijoor, brand and business strategy consultant at Harish Bijoor Consults, said that margins are better for platforms with in-house brands.“Typically most companies are getting insular. The idea is to own brands and own the profits from those brands. When you are a marketplace, you put in effort for other brands, this strategy helps marketplaces lock in on profits instead of losing out to other brands, which sell on the platform,” he said.
At the 49th annual general meeting of Reliance Industries (RIL) on Friday, Isha Ambani, executive director of Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd, and non-executive director of RIL, had laid out plans for Tira. “We will scale our own brands to consumers across India and beyond, ensuring Indian beauty prod-
ucts stand proudly alongside the world’s leading global giants.”
Its in-house brands include Puraveda, Pahadi Local, haircare brand Anomaly, which was recently acquired from actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and skincare and make-up brand Akind, which it co-created with Mira Rajput Kapoor. Its portfolio also includes Nails Our Way and Dream Immerse Play.
Ambani’s statement had come a day after Nykaa’s management had also hinted at expanding its in-house brands on its investor day on Thursday. The platform, operated by FSN E-Commerce Ventures, outlined an ambitious road map to become an over $5 billion beauty and lifestyle business.
The growth of Nykaa’s “House of Brands” is expected to be significant. The management aims to be the largest house of brands business in India by financial year 2030 (FY30). Management has guided toward a net sale value (NSV) compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30 per cent over FY26-30, taking the NSV from Rs. 1,700 crore in FY26 to Rs. 5,000 crore by FY30.
The “House of Nykaa” GMV grew over 65 per cent in FY26, with an improvement in profitability. In a report on the company’s focus on in-house brands business, Motilal Oswal said, “House of Brands is expected to grow faster than the core marketplace business and become a meaningfully larger contributor to group revenues and profits by FY30. We believe profit contribution is expected to increase disproportionately, given the higher gross margins, stronger pricing control, and lower dependence on third-party brands.”
Nykaa’s platform creates a structural incubation advantage, it said. “Fashion today serves about 300,000 styles across categories, while customer discovery increasingly happens through content, personalisation, and creator-led commerce. This allows the company to identify emerging brands and categories early, before allocating capital behind them,” the report added.
As of the fourth quarter of financial year (FY26), “House of Nykaa” had 12 brands across Beauty and Fashion categories at various growth stages, and two successful acquisitions of Dot & Key and Earth Rhythm. Dot & Key has grown 13 times over the last three years, while Kay Beauty has grown three times over this period, said the company. During the Q4FY26 results, the company had said that the strong performance of “House of Nykaa” had impacted margins positively. P Ganesh, chief financial officer, FSN E-Commerce while explaining the margin growth said, “…with gross margin improving by 132 basis points
in FY26, led by strong performance of House of Nykaa and improved service income across businesses.”
For FY26, “House of Nykaa” delivered a strong Rs. 3,176 crore of GMV. “That’s an about 50 per cent year-on-year increase. Served more than 17 million consumers and expanded distribution beyond online as well to 150,000 GT doors. As a reminder, this unit includes brands across beauty and fashion, seven brands in Beauty and in Fashion five brands, with an increased focus on one in particular, which is Nykd,” said Adwaita Nayar, executive director, cofounder and chief executive officer, “House of Nykaa Brands”, during the fourth quarter results.
(Published in Business Standard)
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June 12, 2026
Aanya Thakur & Writankar Mukherjee, Economic Times
12 June 2026, Mumbai/Kolkata
India’s leading retail chains have seen the share of e-commerce in total sales either remain flat or edge up by a sluggish 1-2 percentage points over the past four-five years despite a sustained push towards omnichannel retailing.
An ET analysis of eight major retailers-market leader Reliance Retail, Shoppers Stop, Westside, Arvind Fashions, DMart, Spencer’s Retail, Pantaloons and Bata-showed that the contribution of e-commerce to overall revenue has seen minuscule improvement since 2021-22 even as online sales continue to increase in absolute terms. By contrast, the Covid-19 pandemic spurred explosive growth, with the share of digital sales in total revenue surging three to four times in 2020-21 and 2021-22.
Industry executives attribute the slowdown partly to lower investment levels compared with pure-play digital firms such as Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy and Blinkit-parent Eternal. Besides, retailers have consistently maintained that they will not pursue online growth at the expense of profitability, keeping prices largely aligned across online and offline channels.
The ET study found Tata-owned Westside’s online contribution stood at 7% in 2021-22 and thereafter remained around 6% till 2025-26. Reliance Retail’s online share ranged between 17% and 19% during the period, while Bata’s remained at 10-12%.
For DMart, e-commerce accounted for 5-6% of sales, while Shoppers Stop’s online arm, Shoppers Stop.Com (India) Ltd, contributed less than 1% to the consolidated revenue between 2021-22 and 2024-25. The company has not disclosed 2025-26 online sales figures yet.
“The DNA of these retailers is rooted in the physical world-infrastructure, processes and systems are not inherently designed for e-commerce, which requires a different operating model,” said Devangshu Dutta, chief executive of consultancy Third Eyesight.
“Most retailers calling themselves omnichannel are effectively multi-channel. Online retail is capital-intensive and hyper-competitive. Given the significant scope for physical store expansion, especially in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, retailers are reluctant to invest aggressively online,” he said.
Even so, Avenue Supermarts, which runs DMart, invested Rs 150 crore in online grocery platform DMart Ready this week, following a Rs 174-crore infusion a year earlier.
By comparison, Eternal infused Rs 2,600 crore into Blinkit in 2025 and another Rs 450 crore in March this year. Similarly, Swiggy approved a Rs 1,000-crore investment in supply-chain subsidiary Scootsy last year as both companies expanded their dark-store networks.
The chief executive of Aditya Birla-owned departmental chain Pantaloons, Sangeeta Tanwani, recently told analysts that online sales accounted for just 3-4% of the business. She said the company had earlier refrained from investing in the channel because profitability remained elusive.
“But over the last year, we called out omnichannel as one of our priorities… The reason why we had paused that business was because we wanted to make sure that we can get the unit economics right and make this business profitable… With all the shifts we have made this year, we feel confident of scaling up this business,” Tanwani said.
Reliance Retail, meanwhile, reported lower earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) margin growth in both the January-March quarter and entire 2025-26 as investments in quick commerce weighed on profitability. Chief financial officer Dinesh Taluja recently told analysts that margins depend on the pace at which online and business-to-business segments grow relative to the core offline business.
“If we slow down online growth, margins will improve. It is a mix as far as the online business continues to grow faster,” he had said.
An industry executive said the online contribution may go up modestly in this financial year due to high investment in scaling up dark stores for quick commerce.
Queries emailed to Reliance Retail did not elicit a response till press time. The company had in December last year appointed former Flipkart executive Jeyandran Venugopal as its new chief executive for the retail business.
(Published in Economic Times)
