When I built the masterclass for the Crescent School of Business, I expected to be teaching. Slide after slide, I found myself checking a deck against my own memory instead.
Take the slide on India's 87 percent unorganised market. I met that number at 19, behind a Baskin Robbins counter in Chennai.
The slow-moving flavours were not the problem. The way we presented them was. Bundle them into a sundae and they sold.
The kirana does this by instinct every day, matching what it stocks to who walks in. The organised sector has spent thirty years trying to learn that instinct at scale.
Then came the slide on those who succumbed, with music chains and the early supermarkets on it. I had worked in two of them. At Musicworld and Foodworld,
India's first organised grocery chain, I saw the stores were not short of shoppers. They were short of answers. When we fixed the layout and began ordering on store-level data, private-label sales grew 150 percent in six months. Today's champions, Vishal Mega Mart and Zudio, run on private labels.
The idea was right early. The cash and systems arrived late.
The ecosystem slide shows the mall as the landlord layer. I sat on that side of the table at Central, leasing the spaces nobody planned for: coffee, books, game zones and food courts.
A mall is not a building. It is a tenant mix, and each wrong tenant costs the other shops their footfall.
That is why, when I tell students that retail leasing rose 20 percent in the first half of 2026, I tell them it is the quietest vote of confidence in stores.
Mono-brands showed me the next lesson.
Taking Benetton in the South from one store to six meant appointing franchisees, and the truth was in who we chose, not how many.
Levi's at 500 stores and Bata crossing 2,000 are the same story, a brand scaled by partners it trusted.
Airports and cafés then pushed the idea further. Bangalore's airport retail taught me that a passenger with time is a different customer, so we tied rents to passenger numbers.
Opening 140 Café Coffee Day outlets, from stadiums to IITs, taught me the reverse: the same format wins or loses on its address.
My least comfortable slide is quick commerce. In 2015 I launched a hyperlocal delivery platform in Chennai promising groceries in 30 to 300 minutes.
We were early. There was no UPI habit, no dark-store density and no investor appetite.
When Blinkit and Zepto reached ten minutes, I knew exactly which ingredient had been missing.
Covid completed the picture at Levista Coffee. Points of sale rose from 27,000 to over 77,000 and e-commerce grew about tenfold, but only because we served the kirana and the app together.
That is the answer to the question the students asked, why stores keep opening.
Reliance, Lenskart, Zudio and Titan have understood what I learned at that counter: shoppers do not choose a channel.
They choose convenience, trust and the person across the counter.
For the careers slide I had no new advice, only the old one. Start where the customer is.
Every role I listed, from category and stores to leasing, hiring and training, begins with that.
It is the reason my Strategy Advisory & Consulting Firm Miles2Go offers MBA students, paid internships in market research and data analytics.
India's retail story is still early. The people in that auditorium may well write the next chapter.
