The aroma lives on and on....

The iconic Mysore Sandal Soap just turned 100 years old! At a time when fame and name are a flash in the pan, where companies are patted on the when they survive for 10-years, this soap company has not only been around for 100 years but continues to hold its steed against all new competition and posting profits consistently.

In 1916, the Maharaja of Mysore Nalwadi Krishna Raja Wodeyar and Diwan Sir M Visvesvaraya set up the Government Sandalwood Oil factory at Mysore to extract oil from sandalwood. And since then the story has continued. In 2006, the company was almost taken over by Azim Premji but the employees resisted and it now remains one of the few companies, probably the only soap company in India, which is owned by the state Govt, under the name of run Karnataka Soaps and Detergent Ltd.

The company is a case study in itself – having survived 100 years, Govt owned and still making profits and constantly innovating and expanding its product line.  It already has cosmetics, sandalwood artefacts, detergents and agarbattis and it now plans to launch hand-wash, face-wash, men’s and children’s products.

This old is truly 22-carat gold!