Daybreak

A new generation of designers is on the rise. These designers are expected to be  a lot more than just “one trick ponies”. The new-age ‘Designer X’ is expected to bring  a little bit of everything to the table. They understand the basics of sustainability, how their designs would impact things like climate change and culture. And they would also generally know a little bit of coding too.  And that...

Nothing can dampen a vacation like a chronic migraine. Sunayani Sarkar, a 22-year-old biotechnology student learnt this the heard way during a trip to the Andaman and Nicobar islands last year. A month of terrible migraines later, her doctor suggested she try out a wearable device called Nerivio, developed by Pharma major Dr Reddy's through a partnership with an Israeli bio tech firm called Theran...

Welcome to the world of luxury-lifestyle management, where firms like RedBeryl, Indulge Global, and Quintessentially play the role of concierge for their ultra-wealthy clients, making the impossible possible. Now this sort of thing has become even easier for the rich. Because their wealth managers are also taking care of some of these requests.  It isn’t a one -off thing. Companies like RedBeryl,...

One of the largest deals to acquire a D2C brand took place last week. India’s largest manufacturer of consumer good, Hindustan Unilever acquired the skincare company Minimalist, a 90% shareholding for nearly 3000 crore rupees. Homegrown startup beauty brands have been on a roll in India. Scores and scores of new age skincare brands have cropped up since the pandemic and all of them harp on the sci...

Property prices across Indian cities have gone through the roof, up by nearly 30% in the last two years. This along with ever increasing rent and general cost of living has made planning for the future quite challenging for those in their 20s and 30s.  So has the idea of home ownership changed among the younger generations, like in many Western countries where more and more people are choosing to...

FROM THE ARCHIVES (This episode was first published July 1, 2024) The Economic Times reported yesterday that Zepto, the quick-commerce startup, is in talks to increase the size of its initial public offering to $800 million-$1 billion. Zepto earlier planned to raise $450 million through the issue.  Even when it entered the quick commerce scene for the first time in 2021, Zepto was a disruptor. Now...

A dialogue from Munnabhai has become the ultimate source of inspiration for Acko, a digital general insurer.  "When someone’s dying, do they necessarily have to fill out forms?"  The Ken spoke to multiple Acko executives who said that this line is frequently repeated in meetings of its 21-month-old retail health insurance business. The inspiration seems to be working.   Despite being new to the re...

A bunch of startups are not entering the booming Indian e-bus ecosystem and becoming overnight successes. Just take the case of EKA mobility. Before 2023, EKA was barely a company. It was more the R&D wing of Pinnacle Industries, which is a major manufacturer of seating and interiors for legacy automakers like Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland.  But when the government launched the PM E-Drive subs...

Last week, Ola Electric’s shares saw a three-day slump after the Central Consumer Protection Authority asked the company for more documents for its investigation against it post receiving thousands of consumer complaints. But shares going up and down is regular stuff right? Not for Ola Electric.  The company went public in August 2024 at a debut price of Rs 76 becoming the only startup that went p...

A couple years ago, quick commerce platforms were the place to be for up and coming brands across the country. Just a little sliver of real estate on a rapid delivery app was enough to put them on the map. But now, many of these brands are very quickly realising that success on a Blinkit or a Zepto is a double edged sword. With it comes high commissions, marketing fees, and the constant pressure t...

Hurun India began curating rich lists a decade ago. Now, it has moved up ahead of ranking giants like Bloomberg and Forbes with 17 lists so far. It has a Global 500 list, similar to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. In fact, at this point, it's safe to say that it has replaced Forbes as the most trusted choice for bankers and wealth managers.  Hurun has managed to turn showing it off into a cultural...

For decades, the whole process of getting a loan approved was infamously painful and long winded. But now things have changed. Getting a loan is a whole lot faster than before. And that’s because of the disruptor to end all disruptors — artificial intelligence.  A bunch of companies have entered the scene with specalised AI tools to speed up different aspects of the loan-approval process.  In fact...

On the 25th of November 2024, just five days before the placement drive began at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, a new role was suddenly added to the student’s placement portal. Tech giant Microsoft was looking for a bunch of promising silicon hardware engineers.  This was the first time Microsoft was hiring for this particular role. And it wasn’t just looking at the top tier IITs like...

2024 was the year of the 10-minute delivery. We think we didn't need it but the likes of Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, and Blinkit proved us wrong. While other companies were struggling to find funding, these quick-commerce companies were raising billions of dollars and reporting double-digit, sometimes even triple-digit annual growth rates. In December, Zomato’s quick-commerce subsidiary, Blinkit made...

Welcome to the big fat sustainable Indian wedding!  Over the last few years, sustainability has become a big buzz word in the wedding industry. Multiple wedding planners told Daybreak that couples are now increasingly asking for more ‘sustainable’ alternatives while planning their big day — from offsetting the carbon footprint of the event, to setting up compost pits in the middle of their wedding...

At the end of 2024, Indigo, India’s largest airline, was voted as the airline of the year by Centre for Aviation (CAPA) at the 2024 Global Aviation Awards for Excellence. And then just a couple of weeks later, the airline was in for a rude shock when a survey by a German consumer-rights group ranked it among the worst 10 airlines in the world. Indigo, of course, refuted the findings of the survey...

The sexual wellness industry has long been shrouded in taboo. But now, thanks to quick commerce, getting a stamina supplement or a massage wand has become as effortless as ordering a packet of milk. In the process, the long standing dominance of the old guard – the likes of Durex, Manforce and Score – has also been challenged. That's because these quick commerce platforms shone a light on the many...

For an Indian university, a spot on the QS Rankings list could change everything. It would mean they belonged to the same elite club as the Cambridges and Oxfords of the world. But to nab that spot, universities are stopping at nothing — from admitting more foreign students, to paying top dollar to hire consultants and purchasing seats at conferences. But in the process some fear these universitie...

Last month though, things went crazy in Delhi NCR's real estate market. A DLF penthouse property in Gurgaon, a little over 16,000 square feet in size, sold for a mind-blogging Rs 190 crores. Just the stamp duty was Rs 13 crores, apparently.   What really shocked the internet though was the per-square-foot price—Rs 180,000. When The Ken reporter Rounak Kumar Gunjan first came across it, he immediat...

Today’s episode dives into a fascinating book called Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence , by Shrayana Bhattacharya, an economist with the World Bank’s Social Protection and Labour unit for South Asia. In this groundbreaking work, Shrayana unpacks the economic and social realities of Indian women through the stories of ten individu...

2024 was a defining year for Saregama, one of India’s oldest music labels.  This is a company that has been around for well over a century. For a long time now, it has been associated with the kind of music your parents and grandparents grew up listening to – the classics, evergreen Bollywood numbers, Ghazals, Carnatic music…you get the drift.   But this year, something changed. Saregama made it c...

*This episode was originally published on September 24, 2024 Half of the world’s electric cars are on China’s roads, thanks to a wave of smart incentives for both consumers and manufacturers, such as tax breaks and purchase subsidies. The payoff is tangible: the smog that once shrouded some major cities has lifted, and road noise has dropped significantly. But it brought unexpected costs and chall...

Remember that time in 2022 when India’s top digital payments companies Phonepe, Paytm*, and Bharatpe were in a no-holds-barred turf war? Looking back, it seemed like there was news almost every other day about some tiff between the three market leaders. In fact, former managing director of Bharatpe, Ashneer Grover, has spoken on record about “street fights” between companies’ employees over QR cod...

As 2024 draws to a close, Daybreak hosts Snigdha and Rahel look back at some of their biggest hits and misses this year. Check out the episodes that made it to their round up. Hits — Rahel's choice: Successful Women are Freezing Their Eggs and That's on men Snigdha's choice: Why India's Biggest Employer of Female Gig Workers Refuses to listen to its own workforce Audience choice: What do women rea...

The real-estate market of Delhi-NCR is an anomaly. The Ken spoke to a bunch of potential homebuyers who are looking for premium apartments with budgets of up to 2.5 crore rupees.  Real-estate experts are telling them to give up on their dreams. Lately, the national capital has been facing an acute supply crunch of new housing projects, especially in the mid-premium segment (80 lakh to 2 crore rupe...