Ajoy Chawla, the Man Who Learned Every Brand Titan Owns
Inheriting a strong brand and growing it without diluting it is a quieter skill than building one from nothing, and arguably a rarer one.
Ajoy Chawla has spent more than thirty years at a single company and worked in nearly every category it has ever built, which makes him less a specialist in any one Titan brand and more a specialist in how Titan builds brands in the first place.
Three decades inside one house of brands
Chawla joined Titan as a Tata Administrative Services officer and stayed for over thirty years, moving through watches, jewellery, eyewear, fragrances and even sarees, across sales, marketing, retail, supply chain and strategy functions. That kind of internal mobility inside one company is unusual in Indian corporate careers, where senior executives more often build a reputation in one function before moving companies rather than one company before moving functions.
Running the jewellery business Xerxes Desai and Bhaskar Bhat built
Chawla's highest-profile role was chief executive of Titan's jewellery division, the business that houses Tanishq, Mia, Zoya and CaratLane, brands built on the design-led, quality-obsessed foundation the company's earlier leaders established. Running that portfolio meant protecting decades of accumulated trust in Tanishq specifically, while also growing newer, differently positioned jewellery brands aimed at younger and more price-sensitive customers without confusing what each one stood for.
Inheriting a strong brand and growing it without diluting it is a quieter skill than building one from nothing, and arguably a rarer one inside large Indian companies.
Building categories that did not exist yet
Beyond managing what already worked, Chawla is associated with developing genuinely new categories inside the Titan portfolio, including Taneira in sarees and Skinn in fragrances, extensions that asked a watch-and-jewellery company to build credibility in categories with completely different customer expectations and competitive sets. Launching a new brand inside an established house carries its own risk: a misstep can spill over and damage the parent company's credibility in categories it has spent decades building.
The promotion that confirmed the range
Effective January 2026, Chawla was promoted from chief executive of the jewellery division to managing director of Titan Company as a whole, with Arun Narayan taking over the jewellery business he had been running. That progression, from managing one category exceptionally well to overseeing the entire multi-category portfolio, is the clearest institutional endorsement that his specific skill, moving fluently across very different brand problems inside one company, was never really about jewellery alone.
What three decades of internal mobility actually builds
Chawla's career is a useful reminder that brand-building talent inside a large company is not always about a single signature campaign or product launch. It can just as easily be the accumulated judgement of someone who has personally sat inside sales, marketing, retail and supply chain across five different categories, and learned exactly where each of those functions can quietly damage or protect a brand's promise before it ever reaches a customer.
Photo: courtesy Tata Group.