In 1967, in the walled city of old Jaipur, Ashok Chandnani opened a small watch shop and called it Kashmir Watch Company. It sold and repaired watches for people who would own one or two in a lifetime. A watch then was bought for a wedding or a first salary, and the man who sold it was expected to be there, years later, when it needed attention.

That expectation is the thread running through everything his son has built since.

Litesh Chandnani grew up behind that counter. He learned the trade the way most second-generation retailers do, by watching: how a customer is greeted, how a strap is fitted, how a repair is explained, how trust is built one transaction at a time. By the early 2000s, two things were clear to him. The family's reputation was its most valuable asset. And the shop, as it stood, could not carry that reputation into the India that was taking shape.

Around him, a new kind of customer was emerging. They had travelled. They had walked into watch boutiques in Geneva, Zurich, Dubai and London, and they had come home with Swiss watches in their luggage because nothing at home matched the experience. The brands were sometimes available in India.

The experience was not.

“People were not flying abroad for the watch,” Chandnani says. “They were flying for the way it was sold to them. The quiet of the boutique, the advisor who knew the movement inside the case, the sense that the purchase was an occasion. I wanted that in India.”

In 2007 he founded The Watch Factory. It was less a rebrand of his father's shop than a second company built on its foundations, with one idea at its centre: luxury is not a product. It is an experience, and the........

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