Reimagining Retail in a Digital India

Q1. Could you start by giving us a brief overview of your professional journey, particularly focusing on your expertise in retail operations, strategic planning, and scaling large-format stores across India?

If I look back at my career, my expertise has really been about building retail businesses from scratch and understanding the pulse of the market at a granular level—right down to which roads, high streets, and catchment areas are most promising, and how rental trends shift over time. When I was with Reliance Retail, I was part of the team that helped launch and scale the Trends business in the East and Northeast, which was essentially starting from a blank slate. I’ve always thrived in that builder’s mindset, not just at Reliance, but also when I moved to Lifestyle International. There, my role was to grow the business in East and Central India, taking the store count from just one or two up to 11 or 12 Lifestyle stores, along with a similar number of Home Centre stores. These weren’t small stores either—each was over 40,000 square feet, requiring a very different operational and strategic approach than smaller formats.

Currently, I’m working on scaling up a department store chain that…