The war that made a soap: the full Mysore Sandal story

1. A kingdom stuck with sandalwood

For more than a century, sandalwood in Mysore belonged to the state. In 1792 it was declared the "Royal Tree", and its harvest and sale became a government monopoly. Mysore sold its sandalwood to the world, much of it to Europe.

Then, in 1914, the First World War broke out. Ships stopped, exports stopped, and the kingdom was left sitting on a huge pile of sandalwood that nobody could buy. Most rulers would have waited for the war to end. Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV and his Diwan, the engineer M. Visvesvaraya, did something else: in May 1916 they set up the Government Sandalwood Oil Factory in Mysore to turn the wood into oil, which could be stored, shipped and sold at a far higher value.

They did not see a warehouse full of unsold stock. They saw raw material for a new product.

2. A gift that became a product

In 1918 the Maharaja was given a set of soaps made with sandalwood oil. He liked them so much that he asked a simple question: why can't Mysore make soap like this for its own people?

Visvesvaraya took the idea seriously. He brought in technical experts from Bombay and arranged soap-making experiments at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. Then he picked a young industrial chemist, Sosale Garalapuri Sastry, and sent him to England to learn soap-making properly. When Sastry returned, he standardised the process of adding pure sandalwood oil to soap, and a soap factory was set up near K. R. Circle in Bengaluru. That same year, 1918, Mysore Sandal Soap was born.

3. Designed like jewellery, sold like a festival

Sastry, later remembered as the "Soap Sastry", made one more smart decision. While most soaps of the time were plain rectangles, he made Mysore Sandal oval. The box looked like a jewellery case, with floral prints and rich colours. The soap inside was wrapped in white paper, the way a jeweller wraps a ring.

The logo was the Sharaba, a creature from local folklore with a lion's body and an elephant's head. Every box carried the words Srigandhada Tavarininda, "from the maternal home of sandalwood". The message was clear: this is not just soap, it is a piece of Mysore.

The marketing was bold for its time. The soap's box appeared on neon signboards, tram tickets and matchboxes, and a camel procession was once taken out in Karachi to advertise it. Royal families abroad began to order it. A second oil unit came up at Shivamogga in 1944.

4. Near collapse: when the raw material ran out

In 1980 the soap factory and the oil units at Mysuru and Shivamogga were merged into a public-sector company, Karnataka Soaps and Detergents Limited (KSDL). It then expanded hard, raising production capacity from about 6,000 tonnes to 26,000 tonnes.

But the one thing the brand depended on was disappearing. India's sandalwood output fell from about 4,000 tonnes a year in the 1960s to roughly 350 tonnes by 2014, hit by smuggling, theft and strict controls that discouraged farmers from growing it. With a shortage of sandalwood and too much capacity, KSDL piled up losses of over ₹98 crore in about a decade.

A bigger factory does not save you if your key input is running out.

5. The comeback

The turnaround started with diversification. KSDL launched products that did not depend only on sandalwood oil: talc, hand washes, agarbattis and more. By 2007-08 it had wiped out its accumulated losses and was expected to post a profit of about ₹6 crore on revenue of about ₹160 crore. In 2006 Mysore Sandal Soap and Mysore Sandalwood Oil received a Geographical Indication (GI) tag, which protects the name.

Then it fixed the supply problem at the root. From 2008 KSDL was allowed to buy sandalwood directly from private growers, and later rules let farmers sell more freely. Its "Grow More Sandalwood" programme now aims to develop plantations on 10,000 acres over 10 years, paying farmers ₹500 per sapling over three years.

The product range grew from 34 to 94, with 57 new products in just three years. Sales moved into modern trade (₹420 crore) and e-commerce (₹120 crore). In May 2025, KSDL recorded its best-ever month at about ₹186 crore, even while its choice of a film star as brand ambassador, for a reported ₹6.2 crore, was being hotly debated.

In 2025-26, KSDL crossed ₹2,000 crore in turnover for the first time, at ₹2,016 crore, with a profit of ₹507 crore and a dividend of ₹157 crore to the state. It took 105 years to reach ₹1,000 crore, and only four more to double it. The next targets are ₹3,000 crore by 2028 and ₹5,000 crore by 2030, with a new unit in Vijayapura and plans for the UAE and other markets.

What a shop owner can use from it, this week

• Stuck stock is raw material. Before you sell it at a loss, ask what else it can become: a combo, a smaller pack, a gift box.
• Packaging is part of the product. An oval soap in a jewellery box sold pride, not just soap. How does your product look when it is handed over?
• Protect your key input. Know the one supplier or material your business can't live without, and build a second source before you need it.
• Don't grow capacity faster than demand. A bigger shop or machine only pays if customers are already waiting.
• Old brands can still double. New products, new channels and online sales took a 105-year-old company from ₹1,000 crore to ₹2,016 crore in four years.

Sources: The Better India (founding history) · Business Standard, Apr 2008 (losses and turnaround) · Down To Earth, Mar 2025 (sandalwood supply) · Deccan Herald, Jun 2025 (record month) · PTI via ThePrint, Apr 2026 (FY26 results). Retold by BUILD; figures as published.