Crossword Brand Guidelines: A 1992 Kemps Corner Bookshop, Shoppers Stop & a Pune Franchisee

A Mumbai bookshop of 1992 and its first backers.

Crossword is an Indian chain of bookshops. English Wikipedia says its first store opened on 15 October 1992 at Kemps Corner in Mumbai, and the company’s own website, read in November 2026, also dates the founding to 1992 and places the first store in Mumbai. The business is run by Crossword Bookstores Ltd, whose headquarters English Wikipedia gives as Pune, the home city of its present owners.

The chain’s early history runs through two names in Indian bookselling. A 2012 Franchise India speaker profile of R. Sriram says that he began with the Landmark bookshop in Chennai, set up Walden in Hyderabad and then the Crossword chain, and that India Book House was the initial investor in Crossword. The same profile says Sriram arranged the purchase of Crossword by the department-store company Shoppers Stop from India Book House in 2000, and that he stepped down from Crossword in August 2006.

Dates for the Shoppers Stop takeover differ by source. English Wikipedia says Crossword became a wholly owned subsidiary of Shoppers Stop in 2005; the 2012 profile places the buyout arrangement in 2000. Both agree that the bookshop chain ended up inside a Mumbai department-store group, and by August 2021 Shoppers Stop’s own stock-exchange filing described Crossword Bookstores Limited as its wholly owned subsidiary.

The parent was itself a Mumbai business. English Wikipedia says Shoppers Stop opened its first department store in Andheri, Mumbai, on 27 October 1991, less than a year before the first Crossword, and describes it as a chain owned by the K Raheja Corp group and listed on the BSE and the National Stock Exchange, selling clothing, accessories, footwear, beauty products and home furnishings.

The chain also put its name to a literary prize. English Wikipedia says Crossword founded and sponsors the Crossword Book Award.

Books first, with stationery and toys beside them.

Crossword sells books alongside other goods. Its website, read in November 2026, says the stores carry a hand-picked range of books on many subjects, with premium stationery and toys, and describes interiors designed to give readers quiet spaces in which to browse. It also sells online, with delivery across India, the website says.

Store numbers have moved a great deal, and each count belongs to its date. As of 31 March 2021, The News Minute reported, Shoppers Stop ran 29 Crossword stores in 13 cities, down from 41 a year earlier; the paper said a single franchise partner, Agarwal Business House of Pune, operated a further 26 stores under the name. In November 2026 the Crossword website listed more than 140 stores across 40 cities, a figure the company gives itself. English Wikipedia names cities from Amritsar and Ahmedabad to Thiruvananthapuram and Vadodara among its locations, with Kohima, Siliguri and Kozhikode also on its list.

The franchise partner matters to the brand’s later history. When Shoppers Stop announced the sale of the chain at the end of August 2021, its chief executive said, as quoted by Business Today, that Agarwal Business House had been in the book business for more than two decades. The chain had therefore grown through two kinds of shop under one name for years: stores run by the department-store parent, and stores run by franchise partners, of which the Pune family business was one.

Indian online retail and its storefronts.

This set of guides looks at Indian online retailers and specialty chains, from beauty and baby products to furniture, fashion and books. Most of them meet their customers first on a phone, so the material a design reader can study is the material the companies publish themselves: app screens, the artwork for seasonal sale campaigns, delivery boxes and mailers, and the interiors of the stores some of them have opened.

Several of these brands began online and later added shops. Nykaa, founded in Mumbai in 2012, opened its first store at Delhi airport in 2014, according to English Wikipedia; FirstCry, launched in Pune in 2010, opened its first store in Gujarat within months, a co-founder told Mint in 2024. Others in the set began with physical stores and added online sales later. Each guide notes which way a company grew, and when.

Platform names are described plainly. Many of these businesses trade under a short consumer name while a differently named company owns it: Nykaa is run by FSN E-Commerce Ventures and FirstCry by Brainbees Solutions. Where a brand sits inside a larger group, or was bought by one, the guide gives the owner and the date as the sources report them.

Each guide also draws on corporate pages and press reports on founders, owners and stock-market listings, with the dates those sources give. Store counts and other figures are given as of the date their source reports them. Colours and typefaces are an unofficial interpretation for design study; no logo, product photograph or app screen is reproduced.

Sold by Shoppers Stop to its Pune franchise partner.

Shoppers Stop left the book business in 2021. In a filing to BSE and the National Stock Exchange dated 31 August 2021, it said its board had approved the sale of all its shares in Crossword Bookstores Limited to the family owners of Agarwal Business House (ABH), Pune, the chain’s existing franchise partner, and explained that books were not its core business. Under the agreement, the filing said, the buyer would take over all the assets and the brand. The sale was set out in tranches, beginning with a 51 per cent stake.

Business Today reported on 1 September 2021 that Shoppers Stop had closed the sale of a controlling stake under the share purchase agreement signed on 31 August, and The News Minute reported the same day that the board had approved the transaction. The transfer of the remaining shares in later tranches was agreed at the same time, in August 2021. Shoppers Stop presented the sale as part of a focus on its core business, including its First Citizen loyalty programme, private labels, beauty and omnichannel business, the filing said.

The result is a brand that changed hands without changing its name. The bookshop that opened at Kemps Corner in 1992 passed from its first investor to a department-store group, and then to a family firm that had run Crossword shops as a franchise partner. Through each change the name on the shop front stayed the same.

For a design guide, Crossword shows how a bookshop can build a name from a word game and keep it through three owners, with books, stationery and toys under one sign. Compare FirstCry, another Indian retailer in this series, and Nykaa, a Mumbai-based retailer. For this guide we use a bookcloth red, a spine green and a page cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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