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1. At a Glance
Credo Brands Marketing Limited — the company behind Mufti, the menswear brand that has spent 28 years convincing Indian men that a shirt can have an opinion — reported revenue of ₹125.27 crore for the quarter ended June 2026, up 4.44% year on year. Operating profit came in at ₹26.57 crore against ₹31.04 crore a year earlier. Profit after tax was ₹2.29 crore, versus ₹6.30 crore in the June 2025 quarter. EPS was ₹0.35.
The gap between those two lines has a stated cause and the company puts it in the presentation without much ceremony: marketing spend of ₹10.7 crore in the quarter, 8.5% of total revenue, against ₹5.4 crore in Q1 FY26. That is a marketing budget that grew faster than almost anything else in the P&L, which is what happens when a brand decides its problem is salience rather than stitching.
On the store front, five new outlets opened across malls and high streets and seven underperforming ones were closed — the rare quarter where a retailer’s store count goes down and management describes it as the plan. Total EBOs stood at 427 across 231 cities, part of 1,913 retail touchpoints.
Elsewhere on the record: FY26 revenue was ₹592.10 crore against ₹618.18 crore in FY25, PAT ₹47.42 crore against ₹68.41 crore. CARE Ratings reaffirmed the bank facilities at CARE A+; Stable / CARE A1+ in February 2026. Promoter holding stood at 54.99% in June 2026. The market cap is ₹478 crore and the stated Stock P/E is 10.8, against an industry P/E of 47.2.
Depreciation for the quarter was ₹19.24 crore — comfortably larger than operating profit’s contribution to the bottom line survived.
2. Introduction
Incorporated in 1999, Credo Brands sells fashion casual garments and accessories under the brand name Mufti. Twenty-seven annual general meetings later — the 27th is scheduled for September 11, 2026 — the company is still doing exactly the one thing it started doing, which in Indian consumer land counts as either discipline or stubbornness depending on which slide you are reading.
The company listed on NSE and BSE in December 2023. Kamal Khushlani, promoter and Chairman & MD, has over 25 years of experience in the fashion industry per CARE’s report, and the promoter family collectively holds 54.99% as of June 2026, split across four names on the shareholding table.
Recent history is a study in a company deliberately changing gear. FY22 revenue was ₹341.17 crore; FY25 was ₹618.18 crore. FY26 came in at ₹592.10 crore. Somewhere in that arc, the phrase “MUFTI 2.0” entered the corporate vocabulary and refused to leave — it now appears on the cover of the investor presentation as a formula: Premium Retail Experience × Elevated Merchandise × Brand Storytelling. Multiplication signs in a strategy title are a bold choice, because multiplication is unforgiving about zeroes.
Management characterises the current phase as a “transformation phase” which may not “immediately translate into visible numbers within the next few quarters,” which is one of the more honest sentences to appear in an Indian earnings call this year. Asked on the August 2026 call whether the higher marketing spend would produce higher growth within a year, the MD’s full answer was: “No. I’m unable to say that today.” Analysts on that call went looking for a forecast the way one looks for a light switch in an unfamiliar room, and management kept declining to be the switch: “for the next couple of years, I’m unable to extrapolate and give any numbers.”
There was also a supply-chain episode on record from the prior year — the company attributed a Q2 FY26 revenue decline largely to a temporary disruption from Bangladesh, with about 1 lakh pieces scheduled for September delayed to October–November, and roughly ₹20–25 crore of revenue shifting from Q2 into Q3.
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3. Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?
Mufti designs men’s clothes and then, in a move that would horrify a 20th-century industrialist, owns not a single factory to make them.
The entire model is asset-light by construction: manufacturing is outsourced to job workers and third-party suppliers, with the company retaining control over design and fabric quality. There are over 50 fabric and accessories suppliers and 50-plus manufacturing partners, with an average association of over ten years for the top five — long enough that these are less vendor contracts and more arranged marriages that worked out. The in-house design team is 15 people, and per the presentation they produced a design album of over 1,400 designs during the year, which works out to a design team where each member is responsible for roughly 93 ways for a man to look slightly more interesting.
The product mix in Q1 FY27: Shirts 46.5%, Bottomwear 39.0%, T-shirts 10.8%, Other 4.5%, and Outerwear at -0.8% — a negative product-mix line, which is the sort of thing that happens when a returns-and-retrieval model meets a quarter with no winter in it.
Distribution is where the operational complexity actually lives. Q1 FY27 sales mix runs MBO 61.2%, EBO 17.5%, LFS 11.6%, Online 4.8%, Others 4.9%, across 427 EBOs, roughly 1,336 MBOs and 150 LFS — 1,913 touchpoints in 583 cities. Store operating models are split 35% COCO, 40% COFO, 25% FOFO, meaning the company runs a franchising alphabet where each permutation carries a different answer to the question of whose money is at risk.
And then there is the inventory mechanic, which is the genuinely unusual part. Credo ships fresh stock to EBOs, MBOs and LFS; those partners sell at full price, then at EOSS discount, and then — this is the twist — the unsold merchandise comes back to Credo, which liquidates it through online channels and factory outlets. The company retains inventory risk
