Ethos Ltd

THE DIAL MAKER'S GAMBLE

The Company That Made the Face of Your Watch — Then Sold You the Whole Thing

Turn over almost any fine watch and you will find, staring back at you, a dial and a pair of hands so small and so precisely made that most owners never once think about who made them. For decades, that quiet, invisible craft was the entire business of a Chandigarh company called KDDL — a maker of watch dials and hands, a supplier tucked deep inside the global watch industry's supply chain. Yashovardhan Saboo, an economics graduate from St. Stephen's and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, had set it up in 1983 as Kamla Dials and Devices. It was a good, unglamorous business built on precision and anonymity, the kind of company whose products everyone touches and nobody notices.

Then, in 2003, Saboo did something that made very little sense on paper. The man who supplied the tiny components hidden inside watches opened a shop to sell the finished watches themselves. A single luxury-watch boutique, in Chandigarh, under a new name: Ethos. It was a leap from the back of the supply chain to its very front — from manufacturing a part worth a few rupees to retailing a timepiece that could cost lakhs. Chandigarh in 2003 was not obviously the place to test whether India wanted Swiss watches sold the Swiss way, and almost nobody in the industry thought the country was ready.

It looked like a distraction from a perfectly respectable manufacturing company. It turned out to be the beginning of India's largest luxury-watch retailer, the first one ever to list on a stock exchange, and — by May 2026 — a network of 100 boutiques across 32 cities. The dial-maker had decided that the real opportunity was not inside the watch, but across the counter from the person buying it.

Yashovardhan Saboo

Founder & Chairman · Ethos Ltd (Chairman & MD, KDDL Ltd)

Saboo founded KDDL in 1983 as a specialist maker of watch dials and hands, then walked the family's watch expertise in the opposite direction — into luxury retail. He opened the first Ethos boutique in Chandigarh in 2003 and took the company public in 2022. His son Pranav Saboo now runs Ethos as Managing Director & CEO.

THE CHANDIGARH COUNTER

Why Selling Luxury Watches Is So Much Harder Than It Looks

Luxury-watch retail is one of the most capital-hungry businesses in all of retail, and Ethos ran straight into that wall from its very first store. Unlike a phone or a pair of shoes, a single premium watch can cost lakhs, and the truly exclusive pieces run far higher. To display a range wide enough to be credible, a retailer has to physically own an enormous amount of stock, with cash locked inside glass cases for months while the right buyer walks through the door. It is a business that punishes impatience and rewards deep pockets — and it does so quietly, one unsold case at a time.

The scale of that problem is measurable, and it has barely eased with size. Even in FY26, with a hundred boutiques and a listed balance sheet behind it, Ethos was still carrying roughly seven months of inventory at any given moment. That is the blunt arithmetic of the business: buy the watch, pay for the watch, and then wait.

On top of that sits the harder barrier: the brands. The world's great watchmakers are famously selective about who is allowed to sell their name. Winning and keeping those distribution rights takes years of trust, the right stores in the right cities, and a reputation for treating both the brand and the customer with care. There is no shortcut, no amount of money that buys the relationship faster. And the whole segment is small and import-dependent, serving a narrow slice of Indian buyers, which meant Ethos spent its first decade building a specialist business in a market most people assumed was too thin to matter.

Carry too much of the wrong stock, or lose a key brand relationship, and a boutique full of expensive, slow-moving watches becomes an anchor rather than an asset. Ethos had to master the delicate art of buying deep enough to be credible but disciplined enough to stay solvent. Then came the year the counter went quiet altogether: in FY21, with malls shut and travel frozen, revenue fell to ₹387 crore and net profit shrank to ₹5 crore. For a business whose entire model depended on a customer standing at a glass case, the pandemic was the nearest thing to an existential test it had ever faced.

THE ₹878 MORNING

The Listing That Flopped — and the Decade That Didn't

What rescued the gamble and then powered it was a change in India itself. As the country's affluent class grew, and grew more comfortable spending on itself, the appetite for fine watches climbed steadily. A wristwatch stopped being merely a way to tell time and became a statement, an heirloom, sometimes an investment. Ethos, having spent nearly two decades building the boutiques and the brand relationships nobody else had bothered to build, was standing exactly where that demand landed.

The defining moment came in May 2022, when Ethos went public — the first Indian luxury-watch retailer ever to do so. The IPO was priced at ₹878 a share and was subscribed just 1.04 times. On listing day, 30 May 2022, the stock opened at ₹830 on the BSE, below its issue price, and closed the day around ₹803. It was, by any reading of the tape that morning, a disappointment.

Four years later the tape reads differently. Ethos traded at roughly ₹2,747 in mid-August 2026 — meaning ₹1 lakh put into that unloved IPO at ₹878 would be worth about ₹3.1 lakh today. The market took a while to understand what it had been offered: not a watch shop, but the only listed way to own India's luxury-watch boom.

THE MOAT BEHIND THE GLASS

Why a Rival Can't Simply Copy Ethos

The instinct is to assume that any well-funded retailer could open watch stores and compete. Ethos's story shows why that is far harder than it sounds. Its real moat is a bundle of things that each take years to assemble: exclusive and semi-exclusive distribution rights with the world's top watchmakers, a network of boutiques in exactly the right high-street and mall locations, and the standing among collectors that makes a maison comfortable placing its most precious pieces in your cases.

None of that can be bought quickly. A new entrant with plenty of capital could stock inventory, but it could not conjure two decades of trust with Swiss houses, nor instantly own the flagship locations Ethos already holds, nor replicate collector relationships built one sale at a time. Layer on the family's roots in the industry through KDDL — Saboo has sat on the jury of the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, watchmaking's most prestigious awards — and Ethos sits inside the watch world in a way a pure outsider simply cannot.

That position is why Ethos keeps steering toward the top of the market rather than the middle. Its brand portfolio has grown past 75 names, it has built out mono-brand boutiques, Summit stores and dedicated Haute Horology spaces, and in 2025 it opened City of Time in Gurugram — a 22,000 sq ft horological destination with exclusive brand boutiques, over 50 independent watchmakers, a watchmaking zone, a private viewing lounge and a cigar bar. It has also pushed into certified pre-owned watches, and stepped outside watches entirely with Messika jewellery and RIMOWA luggage. Each move deepens the same moat: the more exclusive the product, the fewer the players who can credibly sell it.

THE HUNDREDTH DOOR

What Four Times the Revenue in Five Years Looks Like

The clearest way to see what Ethos built is to watch the top line since the pandemic year. Revenue went from ₹387 crore in FY21 to ₹1,612 crore in FY26 — a little over four times in five years, a compound growth rate of roughly 33% a year. That is not the growth curve of a sleepy retailer; it is the curve of a category being organised for the first time by the one player big enough to do it.

The share numbers tell the more interesting half of the story. Ethos holds around 13% of India's premium and luxury watch retail — respectable, but hardly domination. Go one tier up, into the exclusive-luxury segment where the rarest and most expensive pieces are sold, and its share is roughly 35 to 40%. That gap is the whole strategy in two figures: Ethos is not trying to win the middle of the market, it is trying to own the top of it, where the margins are richest and the competition thinnest.

WHY IT MATTERS NOW

Riding India's Luxury Wave — and Paying for the Ride

Ethos matters today because the tailwind behind it is strengthening rather than fading. India's luxury spending is in the middle of a structural surge, driven by a fast-growing base of high earners, far greater exposure to global brands, and a cultural shift in which owning a fine watch has become an accepted marker of arrival. Swiss brands that once treated India as a rounding error now treat it as a growth market. As that spending grows, the organised, trusted retailer with the widest brand access is the natural beneficiary — and that is precisely the position Ethos has spent two decades building.

The second, quieter tailwind is the certified pre-owned market, which is expanding fast as collectors buy, sell and trade rare pieces. That segment lives or dies on authentication and trust, exactly the currencies Ethos has accumulated. Being the only listed pure-play adds an edge: the capital and credibility to invest ahead of the market while smaller independent dealers cannot. Ethos has been using it — a rights issue in FY26 raised about ₹410 crore, and total assets swelled from ₹1,410 crore to ₹2,197 crore in a single year.

None of that comes free, and the numbers show the bill. Operating margins slipped from 16% in FY25 to about 13% in FY26 as new stores absorbed rent, staff and ramp-up costs; net profit stayed flat at ₹96 crore even as revenue grew 29%. Return on equity sits near 8%, and the stock trades at close to 70 times earnings — a price that already assumes the next decade goes well. Look out five to ten years and the arc still points toward deepening leadership, but the honest version of the story is that Ethos is spending heavily today to own a market that has not fully arrived yet.

Financial figures are sourced from publicly available information and may not reflect the most recent reporting period. This is a story, not investment advice — please verify all data independently before making any financial decision.