MUMBAI: Retail empires are not built by the faint-hearted. Sumit Chandna, freshly installed as chief executive of Max Fashion, knows this better than most. The 25-year veteran, promoted from deputy chief executive at Lifestyle International, has spent a career extracting profits from India’s cutthroat retail trenches.
His record is formidable. At every stop—Shoppers Stop, Hypercity, Aditya Birla Retail, Bata India and Landmark Group—Chandna has delivered the same brutal formula: fatter margins, leaner costs, higher sales. It is a skill honed across hypermarkets, department stores and specialist retail, from high fashion to groceries.
A graduate of the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Delhi, Chandna earned his stripes at Shoppers Stop, where he launched India’s first designer co-brand, Kasba, with Raghavendra Rathore. At Hypercity, he built merchandising systems from scratch and delivered results 70 per cent above plan with margins six percentage points higher than target. During an 11-year stint at Aditya Birla Retail, he rose to chief merchandising officer, pushing promotional sales from eight per cent to 23 per cent in four months and launching profitable private-label lines.
Three years at Bata India saw him juggle retail operations and merchandising before Landmark Group poached him in 2022 to run Max as deputy chief executive. Now he has the corner office.
Chandna is also a certified executive coach who has recruited talent from top business schools across India and Asia, lectured at management campuses and attended leadership programmes at Harvard and IMD in Lausanne. He won the Aditya Birla Group chairman’s award for exceptional contribution—no small feat in a conglomerate that size.
His mandate at Max is simple: keep the juggernaut rolling. In announcing his promotion, Chandna promised to lead the brand into its “next phase of growth, innovation, and impact”. Strip away the corporate speak, and it means the same thing it always has: sell more, spend less, make more.
