In a small industrial town in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region, a father and son have spent the last few years quietly solving a problem that most people never think about: how does someone with a good idea for a perfume brand actually get that perfume made?

The answer, for a growing number of Indian entrepreneurs, creators and D2C founders, has been YKS Ventures Private Limited

— a private label and white label perfume manufacturer built by Chandrakant Karbhari Shinde and his son, Yash Chandrakant Shinde. On 19 August 2026, the two are launching their most ambitious move yet: YKS Industries, a dedicated perfume oil operation that takes the family business upstream into the part of the fragrance value chain that has historically been the hardest for any Indian company to enter.

The Business They Built First

To understand why YKS Industries matters, it helps to understand what YKS Ventures does.

India’s fragrance market has expanded sharply over the past decade. Rising disposable incomes, the normalisation of personal grooming as a category, and the explosion of creator-led commerce have produced a generation of would-be brand owners. What they have not produced is a generation of manufacturers willing to work with them.

The traditional perfume manufacturing model in India was built for scale. Large orders, long lead times, established buyers. A creator with an engaged audience of 200,000 people and five lakh rupees to invest does not fit that model — not because the opportunity isn’t real, but because the infrastructure was never designed for them.

YKS Ventures was built specifically for that buyer. The company offers a turnkey route to market: fragrance selection, blending, bottle sourcing, cap and pump specification, label design and application, box design and packaging, and dispatch — all coordinated under one roof, with the client owning the brand outright. The founder does not need a factory, a compliance team, or a relationship with a dozen vendors. They need an idea and a partner willing to take an order that a legacy manufacturer would turn away.

That model works. It also revealed, over hundreds of orders, exactly where the bottleneck sits.

The Bottleneck Is the Oil

Every perfume is, in the end, an oil. The bottle is a container. The box is marketing. The label is identity. But the product — the reason a customer buys once and then buys again — is the fragrance compound itself, and the quality of that compound determines whether a brand survives its second order.

For an Indian manufacturer assembling finished perfumes, oil is the single line item with the least control and the most consequence. Compound is sourced from importers, traders and distributors. Prices move. Batches vary. Lead times are unpredictable. And a small brand asking for a fragrance developed to its own specification — its own accord, rather than something already on a shelf — generally cannot get one at all, because the international houses that do bespoke development allocate perfumer time to accounts that can justify it.

“We kept running into the same wall. We could give a client everything else. The bottle, the packaging, the compliance, the shipping. But when they asked for a fragrance that was genuinely theirs, we were dependent on somebody else’s catalogue and somebody else’s timeline. If you want to build brands properly, you have to own the fragrance.”

— Yash Chandrakant Shinde, Founder, YKS Ventures Private Limited

YKS Industries is the answer to that wall.

What YKS Industries Will Do

Launching 19 August 2026, YKS Industries is a perfume oil operation supplying fragrance compounds to perfume brands, manufacturers, and personal care businesses. The offering is built around three commitments that reflect what the team learned running YKS Ventures.

Quantities that match real brands. The prevailing model asks a buyer to commit to volumes that a launching brand simply cannot absorb. YKS Industries is structured around order sizes that match how new brands actually operate — small first runs, faster reorders, and the ability to test a fragrance in market before committing capital to it.

Transparent costing. Fragrance compound pricing in India is notoriously opaque. Quotes take days. Rates are negotiated rather than published. YKS Industries is building around clear per-litre and per-kilogram pricing, with concentration and blend ratios laid out so a buyer can calculate their landed cost per bottle before placing an order — not after.

Development access. Beyond a stocked catalogue, YKS Industries intends to take briefs — brands that want an accord built for them rather than selected from a list.

A Father-Son Business

There is a version of this story that gets told often in Indian business media: the young founder, the disruption, the ambition. It is usually only half the story.

YKS Ventures was built by two people with very different things to contribute.

What is clear is the division of labour that has made the business work: the operational discipline and vendor relationships on one side, the market instinct and client-facing execution on the other. Manufacturing businesses fail at the seams — between what was promised and what was shipped, between the order book and the plant floor. Family businesses that survive tend to be the ones where those seams are held by people who trust each other.

The Indian Fragrance Context

YKS Industries enters an industry with real depth behind it. India has a fragrance manufacturing history stretching back over a century — S H Kelkar & Company, now known as Keva, has been making perfumes here since 1922 and is today one of the country’s largest fragrance companies with a substantial international footprint. Oriental Aromatics, Bromochem and a number of specialist exporters have built serious businesses in aroma chemicals and compounds. Kannauj has been distilling attars for generations.

What that established base has not done — and arguably was never structured to do — is serve the bottom of the market. The infrastructure exists for large buyers. It does not exist for the founder with one SKU and a Shopify store.

That is the gap YKS Industries is being built into: not as a replacement for India’s incumbent fragrance houses, but as an independent supplier structured for the segment they don’t serve. The comparison the team makes internally is to the international houses — Givaudan, Luzi and the others whose compounds set the quality benchmark in this market. The ambition is not to match their scale. It is to make that standard of compound accessible to a buyer who currently has no route to it.

“Nobody is trying to out-scale the global houses. We are trying to serve the people they were never going to serve. That is a different business, and it is one we understand because we have been those customers ourselves.”

— Chandrakant Karbhari Shinde

What Comes Next

The 19 August launch is the beginning rather than the conclusion. The stated roadmap includes expanding the compound catalogue, building in-house development capability, and eventually serving buyers beyond the founder-brand segment that YKS Ventures currently works with.

For the two people behind it, the move upstream is less a pivot than a completion. A company that assembles perfumes is dependent on whoever makes the fragrance. A company that makes the fragrance controls its own product.

Whether YKS Industries becomes a significant name in Indian fragrance will be decided by the same thing that decides it for

everyone: whether the oil is good, and whether it is good every single time. That answer starts arriving on 19 August.

ABOUT YKS VENTURES PRIVATE LIMITED

YKS Ventures Private Limited is a private label and white label perfume manufacturer based in Vaijapur, Maharashtra, offering end-to-end fragrance production for entrepreneurs, creators and established brands. The company handles fragrance selection, blending, bottling, labelling, packaging and dispatch, allowing clients to launch perfume brands under their own name without manufacturing infrastructure.

Web: yksventures.com