Indriya Not Chasing Store Count, Focus on Quality; Revenue Ahead of Target, Says CEO Sandeep Kohli

For Aditya Birla Group’s a year-old jewellery brand Indriya, the number of stores is just a milestone rather than a target, according to CEO Sandeep Kohli. He claims that their focus for now is to “open a store with the right store, in the right place, with the right jewellery, with the right people inside.”

The brand under Novel Jewels, which was launched in July ’24 with four stores, has expanded to over 41 stores so far. At the time of launch, the Aditya Birla Group had proposed to open 100 stores by FY26 and had provided ₹5,000 crore as an investment outlay.

“What we have realised as we have come into the journey is that if you base your business plan on the number of stores that you open, you will make a big mistake,” Kohli told Outlook Business in an interview.

“If we chase a number, we could go very wrong. So we are not chasing any number in terms of it. But of course, you know, if we opened with four, now we are at 41 in 24 cities, the next would be 50, then we’re doing it to 75, then it would be 100. So these are just milestones in our journey,” he added.

Emphasising that Indriya is prioritising quality over speed in its store expansion, Kohli said that while accessibility through a wider store network is important, the company opens stores only when the location, jewellery assortment and trained staff are fully ready. Each store must meet strict internal readiness criteria, including certified staff training, before it is launched.

However, he added that because Indriya’s ultimate milestone is to be among the top three jewellers, “which is what the ABG Group philosophy is, that any business you enter, your aspiration has to be how you become the top thing and work backwards from there.”

Kohli also noted that the company is yet to fully deploy the ₹5,000 crore earmarked for them as “revenues are ahead of target”, and they started working with franchisee partners within six months of operation.

“All brands launched their franchises much later, but we launched ours within less than six months of operation. We had a franchise system. And our franchisee model is quite unique. So we studied franchise models not only in the jewellery industry but in other industries as well, because we wanted to create very strong partnership models with our franchisees,” he said.

The Indriya CEO also noted that their stores are already breaking even.

“Broadly speaking, we are breaking even at the store level. Some stores are not just breaking even but are also making a profit. But, at a broad-brush level, we have got our model right,” he said.

Adding that, “I can tell you that in every catchment we have entered, we have very rapidly built market share compared to whoever the largest player is in that market. We are already at a very high percentage of that. So this shows that our model is right. We have franchisees who are doing well, and we are seeing strong consumer traction.”

Explaining that this was driven by rapidly setting up high-quality stores at optimised costs, supported by a strong project engineering team and expertise from the Aditya Birla Group, Kohli said that at the same time, Indriya is driving footfalls through a digital-first marketing strategy that targets the right customers at the right time and location, ensuring each store launches with strong momentum.

Future Expansion Plan

On future plans of region wise expansion, Kohli says that they “are not positioning ourselves as a national jeweller in the traditional sense” but as “a community player that happens to be part of a large group.”

“We started with the North and the West. Now we are present in the East and the South as well. We have stores in places like Hatibagan (Kolkata), two in Bengaluru, one in Kolkata, one in Patna and one in Gaya. So it’s spread across India. We may have started in the North and North-West, but we see ourselves as a jeweller for the local community and the region.”

He added that they are already present in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities “because we approach each market locally.”

On the question of expanding overseas, Kohli said that “for now, our focus is on expanding within India because there is a lot of unmet demand here,” but at a later stage, they will think about how to take the brand to different countries.