DMart Brand Guidelines: Damani’s 2002 Powai Store, Owned Sites and a 2017 Listing

An investor, a franchise apprenticeship and three stores in Mumbai.

DMart is the store name of Avenue Supermarts Ltd, a Mumbai company that runs supermarkets and hypermarkets across India. Its founder is Radhakishan Damani, who, Forbes India reported in October 2017, had made his name as an investor in consumer stocks before deciding in 1995 to try retailing. He learned the trade slowly. Over the following decade, the magazine wrote, he ran two franchises of the Apna Bazar cooperative chain, spending time in a 7,000-square-foot store in Nerul to watch which items sold and how shoppers behaved; Apna Bazar decided most of what those stores carried, which left him less room than he wanted. Outlook Business, in a December 2022 profile, dates the franchise to 1997.

Damani incorporated Avenue Supermarts in 2000. Two years later, in 2002, the company opened its first DMart in Powai, in Mumbai’s northern suburbs, followed soon after by stores in Kandivali and Malad, according to Forbes India; English Wikipedia gives the same 2000 and 2002 dates. Damani was actively involved in the business until 2006, the magazine reported, and kept mentoring the young merchandise team until 2011.

The management that took the chain forward came largely from the consumer-goods trade. Neville Noronha, who had looked after modern-trade accounts at Hindustan Unilever, joined in January 2004 and started as head of operations at the Malad store, where the whole team worked from “three desks,” Forbes India wrote; by 2017 he was chief executive and managing director. In 2006, when DMart had seven stores, it installed its first enterprise resource planning system, and by 2011 it had set up a distribution centre.

Growth was deliberately slow. English Wikipedia describes a policy of everyday low prices and “slow expansion,” with 29 stores across Maharashtra and Gujarat in 2010. The first move outside Mumbai, to Ahmedabad, did not go smoothly: Noronha told Forbes India that the store had to be made smaller before shoppers came.

Groceries bring shoppers in; general merchandise pays.

The DMart format is built around low everyday prices rather than promotions. Forbes India described the model in 2017: the stores sell groceries and fast-moving goods such as toiletries and personal care, and use them to bring in shoppers who also buy higher-margin general merchandise, including toys, crockery, garments, home appliances and footwear. “It’s the groceries that get shoppers in, but the general merchandise that drives our profits,” the company’s chief financial officer told the magazine. DMart had no loyalty programme, it noted, unlike some rivals.

Much of the identity is in the buildings. Unlike most Indian supermarkets, which leased small premises, DMart ran much larger stores and owned most of them, English Wikipedia says. Outlook Business reported in 2022 that Damani chose to own the real estate under DMart’s standalone stores rather than take long mall leases, and called the stores no-frills and air-conditioned. Owning the land, Forbes India wrote, gave the company freedom over store layout and product mix; by 2017 it had also begun to take some stores on long leases. A 2021 report in The Ken, cited by English Wikipedia, put newer stores at 50,000 to 60,000 square feet.

Inside, the shelving is part of the look. The company’s pre-IPO prospectus, as quoted by Forbes India, describes higher racks than usual, with the upper levels used for storage and the lower levels for display, so that goods are stacked close to the ceiling. Aisles were not widely spaced, the magazine reported. The company paid suppliers faster than many rivals, which Outlook Business put at within 10 days of delivery, and grew in clusters: it built one region before moving to the next, a former Shoppers Stop managing director told the magazine.

Online, the chain added DMart Ready in December 2016, according to English Wikipedia. In its early form, Forbes India wrote, DMart Ready used small pick-up points of no more than 200 square feet, where customers collected orders placed online, with home delivery offered for a fee; about 40 had opened by October 2017.

How Indian chains present themselves.

India’s large store chains present themselves in quite different ways, and the differences start with where the stores stand. Department-store groups have long followed the shopping mall: afaqs! reported in 2019 that Shoppers Stop had opened a 50,000-square-foot store in Gurugram stocked with premium labels. DMart took the opposite route, Outlook Business reported in 2022, owning the land under its standalone supermarkets rather than leasing space in malls.

The festival calendar shapes the year for these retailers. Shoppers Stop’s first general manager writes in his memoir that the team hurried to name and open the original Andheri store in 1991 so that it could trade before Diwali. Advertising matters as much as the calendar: when Shoppers Stop changed its logo in 2008, afaqs! reported, the new identity arrived with seven commercials, a press campaign and outdoor posters, with creative work by Contract Advertising.

Own labels are a second thread. In August 2025 Indian Retailer reported that Shoppers Stop’s private brands and its value-fashion format, Intune, were growing alongside the third-party brands in its department stores; Forbes India wrote in 2017 that DMart meant to work harder on private labels of its own. Names are often simple phrases: Shoppers Stop’s, the same memoir says, was suggested by a supermarket name seen in Boston.

Most of the larger chains also keep corporate pages that set out their founders, parent groups and stock-exchange listings, since several trade on the BSE and NSE in Mumbai. This guide uses those pages alongside dated press, and marks clearly where a fact rests on the company’s own word.

A listing in 2017 and a national store map.

Avenue Supermarts went public in March 2017, listing on the National Stock Exchange and the BSE; English Wikipedia and Forbes India give the listing date as 22 March 2017. Only about a tenth of the company’s shares were offered in the IPO, Forbes India reported. At the time of the Forbes India article the chain had 131 stores across seven states.

The store map has since widened well beyond Maharashtra and Gujarat. English Wikipedia lists entries into Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh by 2016, and Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Punjab and Delhi NCR by 2018. It says DMart passed 300 stores in 2022, with about three-quarters in its cluster states, and passed 500 stores in April 2026. Outlook Business counted 284 outlets, including DMart Ready and Minimax locations, in December 2022; the two counts use different bases, so both are given here.

The registered office of Avenue Supermarts is in Powai, the neighbourhood of the first store, according to the company’s filings with the BSE. The company has kept its focus on everyday household needs.

For a design guide, DMart shows how a retail brand can be built from plain, repeated decisions: large owned buildings, tall racks, a narrow and steady range and one store name used everywhere. Compare Big Bazaar, the Future Group hypermarket chain that opened about a year before DMart, according to Outlook Business, and More, another Indian grocery chain in this series. For this guide we use a deep green, a warm yellow and a kraft brown with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep DMart’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.