WOW STORY OF THE DAY: He Left a Haryana Village at 18 With Nothing, Opened a 50-Square-Foot Shop in Mumbai With ₹2,500, and Built India's Most Trusted Electronics Retail Chain.

Kaithal to Mumbai, and the School That No University Offers

•⁠  ⁠⁠Nanu Gupta grew up in Kaithal, Haryana, in a farming family. He only studied until Class 10. At 18, in 1954, he left his village and arrived in Mumbai, staying with a cousin who distributed Usha sewing machines and fans. Nanu became a salesman.

•⁠  ⁠⁠Those years at Usha were the education that shaped everything. He learned how to read a customer's hesitation. He learned that trust, built one interaction at a time, was worth more than any advertisement. 

•⁠  ⁠⁠He learned that the person standing across the counter was not a transaction but a relationship."I started it with four things: best products, service, price and honesty," Nanu would later say.In 1967, he took his savings, approximately ₹2,500, and opened a small shop in Matunga, Mumbai. He named it Vijay Sales, after his brother Vijay. 

•⁠  ⁠⁠The first products were fans and sewing machines. The store was roughly 50 to 60 square feet. It was a beginning that most people would not have noticed.

Keep Every Television Switched On

•⁠  ⁠The decision that changed Vijay Sales forever came in the early 1980s when colour television arrived in India. Most retailers were cautious. The new product was expensive, the market was uncertain, and the risk was real.

•⁠  ⁠Nanu moved in the opposite direction. He opened a larger showroom in Mahim dedicated to colour TVs and made one simple, brilliant decision: keep every television in the store switched on at all times. The vibrant moving images in the window drew passersby off the street and into the store. Sales followed.

•⁠  ⁠Vijay Sales was also the first retailer in Mumbai to introduce the display concept, arranging products in a way that let customers experience them rather than simply read labels. When competitors thought this was wasteful, Nanu understood that people buy what they can imagine using.

•⁠  ⁠The customer service philosophy was equally ahead of its time. Long before EMI became an industry standard, Nanu offered installment payment options to customers who could not pay upfront. If a product developed a fault, he would visit the customer personally to resolve it. 

•⁠  ⁠⁠Thousands of families in Mumbai built their loyalty to Vijay Sales not because of marketing but because of Nanu Gupta knocking on their door.

•⁠  ⁠When he bought a four-floor store in Goregaon in the mid-2000s, the industry said he had gone mad. "They were worried we are investing too much money on big stores," Nanu recalls, "but now even that store is falling short."

Scale, Numbers and Real-World Impact

•⁠  ⁠Vijay Sales currently operates 157-plus stores across Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana. The company generated revenue of ₹7,100 crore in FY23 and has a target of reaching ₹8,000 to ₹10,000 crore with 200 stores. It offers over 5,000 products across 11 major categories. Vijay Sales has 37 stores in Mumbai alone, 33 in Telangana, 26 in Delhi, and 24 in Gujarat. It is headed by founder and Chairman Nanu Gupta alongside Managing Directors Nilesh Gupta and Ashish Gupta, his two sons, and Karan Gupta, his grandson who joined the business in 2019 after graduating from Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. In 2019, Vijay Sales expanded to South India by acquiring Tirumala Music Center stores in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The Mahim store where Nanu started has expanded from its original small format to 40,000 square feet and is now a landmark in Mumbai.

Every Empire Starts With the Willingness to Be Seen Doing the Small Things

•⁠  ⁠The sharpest lesson from Nanu Gupta's story is one that no business school teaches as clearly as his life demonstrates it: the foundations of a great business are always personal.

•⁠  ⁠⁠Nanu walked to work in the monsoon because he believed work is worship. He personally visited customers with faulty products because he understood that a problem solved in person is a relationship cemented for life. He offered instalment plans before banks made them fashionable because he saw his customers as people, not just buyers.

•⁠  ⁠⁠Three generations of Mumbai families have walked into Vijay Sales, a grandfather who bought his first transistor, a son who bought his first colour TV, a granddaughter buying a phone on her birthday. A customer visited Prabhadevi branch just to share that story, and Vijay Sales turned it into a television commercial.

•⁠  ⁠⁠That is a brand built on something that has always been more valuable than any product range or pricing strategy: the simple, unwavering decision to treat every person who walks through your door as someone worth serving well.

•⁠  ⁠⁠From a 50-square-foot shop in Matunga to 157 stores and ₹7,000 crore in revenue, Nanu Gupta built it all one customer at a time.

Sources: Wikipedia, The Weekend Leader, Pune Pulse, Bollywood Shaadis