Each story is a long-form look at one Indian listed company — how it was founded, how it makes money, and what the numbers actually mean.
A ₹5,000 loan from his brother, a year of failed kitchen experiments and one bottle of purple liquid. The story of how M.P. Ramachandran's Ujala built Jyothy Labs, and what the end of the Pril licence means for it.
He owed ₹6 crore after three failed businesses. He borrowed ₹15 lakh from family, sold cheese balls out of a 100-square-foot room in Indore, and took on Lay's with cheaper packets and a habit of finding markets nobody else wanted. Seventeen years later, Yellow Diamond is a listed company — and its founder just got five more years to run it.
He failed Class 10 and dropped out of school. In 2008 he rented a 200 sq m shed in Hyderabad with one second-hand machine and decided to make parts for jet engines. Today Rolls-Royce trusts him.
The company that made the dials hidden inside watches opened one shop in Chandigarh in 2003 — and now runs 100 boutiques as India's first listed luxury-watch retailer.
A Stanford engineer quit Oracle, backpacked the world, and came home to plant grapes in Nashik. He ended up creating India's wine industry — and owning ~65% of it.
India imported its dinner sets for years — expensive from Europe, flimsy from China. In 1988 a Kolkata family bet on opalware to fix that. Today they own 55%+ of India's organised market and export to 40+ countries.
A Ludhiana homemaker's 1978 kitchen recipes became national food infrastructure — a dual-engine biscuits, bakery and QSR-supply business that crossed Rs 2,000 cr.
His father died when he was 15. He dropped out of school to run a tiny hardware shop in Mumbai's Lohar Chawl. Today that shop is Polycab India — the country's largest wires and cables company.
A kerosene-stove workshop from 1994 grew into a 41-million-unit-a-year kitchen appliance machine that IPO'd 18 times oversubscribed.
Roughly one in every three toothpaste tubes on the planet is made by one Indian company you've never heard of — the story of EPL Ltd.
A father named his company after his daughter and bet on two chemicals nobody wanted to make. She turned IBB and ATBS into a global monopoly — ~65% of the world's ATBS, run out of Mumbai.
An Ahmedabad architect went bankrupt chasing too many products — then bet everything on a single one and built the world's largest air-cooler brand.
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