Ethos is India’s largest luxury watch retailer, a business built on a simple idea: give India’s wealthy a place to buy fine timepieces with the trust and experience of a specialist, not a general store. It started in 2003 with a single boutique in Chandigarh and became the first of its kind to list on the Indian stock exchange in 2022, all while guided by a long-term vision to grow tenfold in a decade. The recurring approach is to secure exclusive relationships with the world’s best watch brands, build a national network of boutiques to reach customers wherever they are, and then use that platform to expand into adjacent luxury categories and services like pre-owned watches - each new engine fed by the trust and customer base of the one before.
Business segments
Two engines at different stages - a national luxury watch retail platform that is the core of the business, and a younger lifestyle retail arm that plants the same model into jewellery and premium luggage.
1. Luxury watch retail: where the group’s brand relationships and customer trust are built
Ethos is India’s leading vertical specialist for premium and luxury watches, operating a chain of nearly 100 boutiques that stock over 60 brands, half of them exclusively, and selling to a base of over 330,000 registered high-net-worth customers.
- Exclusivity creates the moat - Ethos holds exclusive retail contracts for 49 of the over 80 watch brands it carries, typically lasting five to nine years with auto-renewal, which means many of the world’s most desirable watches can only be bought new in India through its stores.
- A national boutique network - as of May 2026, the company runs 98 boutiques across 32 cities in 19 states, spanning large-format Summit stores, multi-brand outlets, and mono-brand boutiques for single luxury names, so it can place a brand with limited production in just three or four key stores while mass-appeal brands sit in most locations.
- The customer base is wealthy and loyal - over 46% of business comes from repeat buyers, supported by a loyalty programme called Club Echo that has enrolled more than 334,000 high-net-worth individuals, making it the only Indian luxury watch retailer with such a programme.
- Omnichannel drives discovery - the company’s website draws over 12 million visitors and its digital channels account for more than a third of total billings, while an in-house content engine, The Watch Guide, publishes 52 stories a month and an in-house studio has produced videos with over 359 million views, pulling new customers into the physical boutiques.
- After-sales service locks in trust - Ethos Watch Care's new pick-and-drop service, supported by a state-of-the-art service centre in New Delhi with skilled watchmakers, covers over 7,000 pin codes and provides a two-year warranty on all servicing, which reduced customer complaints by 90%.
2. Lifestyle retail: the watch platform extended to jewellery and luggage
Ethos uses the same playbook - exclusive brand partnerships and prime boutique locations - to sell luxury jewellery and premium luggage through a separately funded subsidiary.
- Exclusive rights, familiar model - the lifestyle vertical holds an exclusive partnership with Messika for diamond jewellery in India and a franchise contract with Rimowa, the LVMH-owned premium luggage maker, replicating the exclusive-brand approach that powers the watch business.
- Boutiques, not pop-ups - after testing jewellery sales via pop-ups inside watch stores with strong feedback, the company now focuses on dedicated boutiques, opening India’s first exclusive Messika boutique in New Delhi and two Rimowa boutiques in New Delhi and Mumbai.
- Funded for growth - the lifestyle subsidiary raised ₹179.50 crores from external investors in 2025, diluting Ethos’s stake to 75.05%, so the venture can expand without drawing on the watch business’s cash flows.
Second Movement: the certified pre-owned engine
Second Movement is India’s only organised player that can certify, restore and sell pre-owned luxury watches, turning the existing boutique network into a nationwide sourcing machine.
- In-house restoration is the differentiator - pre-owned watches are bought from customers, authenticated and refurbished by expert watchmakers at a central technical facility, then sold with a two-year warranty, which creates trust in a market where authenticity is everything.
- Stores feed the pipeline - staff across the pan-India boutique network ask customers if they have unused watches to sell or trade in, giving the business a unique all-India sourcing platform that no unorganised dealer can match.
- Fast turnover, capacity-constrained - a refurbished watch typically sells in less than a month, so the bottleneck is not demand but the speed at which the technical team can restore watches.
- A young, growing market - over half of Indian survey respondents say they are likely to buy a pre-owned luxury watch within a year, and the pre-owned segment is growing at over 30% year-on-year, driven by younger buyers seeking affordability and collectability.
Group structure and partners
Ethos is controlled by KDDL Limited, a watch-component manufacturer whose decades-old relationships with Swiss brands gave the retailer its start, and the founder’s family runs the business day-to-day.
- KDDL Limited holds 50.12% of Ethos and has supplied watch dials to luxury brands since 1981, connections that were instrumental in Ethos securing its early exclusive retail contracts.
- The group structure includes a wholly owned IT subsidiary (Cognition Digital LLP) that builds its digital platforms, a Dubai trading subsidiary (Ficus Trading LLC) for international expansion, and a stake in the Swiss watch brand Favre Leuba, which Ethos uses to control that brand’s retail presence in India while KDDL handles manufacturing.