Vijay Sales Brand Guidelines: A 1967 Mahim TV Shop, Family Control and the TMC Stores

A fan distributor, a borrowed stake and a shop in Mahim.

Vijay Sales is a Mumbai chain of consumer-electronics stores that began with a single shop in Mahim in 1967. English Wikipedia gives the company’s name as Vijay Sales (India) Pvt. Ltd. and places its headquarters in Jogeshwari, in Mumbai. Its founder, Nanu Gupta, had moved to Bombay in 1954 at the age of 18 and worked for close to 13 years as a distributor for Usha International, the sewing-machine and electric-fan company, Outlook Business reported in a profile of the chain. He told the magazine that constant worry about losing that arrangement was what pushed him to start a business of his own.

In 1967, with money borrowed from family and friends, he set up Vijay Sales Corporation, named after his younger brother, whom he took on as a partner, and opened the Vijay Television Store in Mahim, Outlook Business wrote. The outlet covered about 50 square feet, so small, the magazine said, that he had to fold up his chair to make room for customers. Despite its name, the shop sold sewing machines, fans and radios as well as black-and-white television sets, with brands such as Bharat TV and, later, Dyanora, Crown and Standard. Gupta told the magazine that television sales laid the foundation of the business that followed.

By 1981, when the business was renamed Vijay Sales, the Mahim store had grown about six-fold, and branches followed across Mumbai’s suburbs. Gupta told Outlook Business that a Goregaon store opened in 1998, at 1,500 square feet, was bigger than any shop the chain had run before, and that people thought the family had lost its mind because there was so little electronics to display. Later stores ranged from about 4,000 to 25,000 square feet, and all of them were company-owned, the magazine reported. When the chain began selling larger white goods such as refrigerators, washing machines and air-conditioners in the early 1980s, it ran its own delivery vans; that work was later handed to local logistics firms running branded vehicles for the company.

From Mumbai suburbs to Gujarat, Delhi and Hyderabad.

For decades the chain stayed mostly in Mumbai and the rest of Maharashtra. Nilesh Gupta, Nanu Gupta’s elder son and the company’s managing director, told Outlook Business that the arrival of large groups in electronics retail, naming Future Group’s eZone, Reliance Digital and Tata’s Croma, made the family decide to expand. From the 2009 financial year it opened stores in Delhi, the National Capital Region and Gujarat. At the time of the profile the chain had 54 stores in five states and more than 1,500 staff, with around 9,000 items on display, from mobile phones and home-theatre systems to mixers and cooking ranges, and nine warehouses across India. It began selling online in 2012 and later opened a storefront on the marketplace Snapdeal, the magazine reported.

The move south came by acquisition. In April 2019 Indian Retailer reported that Vijay Sales had bought TMC Electronics, a Hyderabad chain of 19 stores across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana,; the Gupta family bought out the four promoters who had controlled TMC. Vijay Sales was operating 82 stores in western and northern India at that point, the report said. English Wikipedia says the initials stood for Tirumala Music Center and that the TMC stores have since been rebranded as Vijay Sales.

The company has stayed in family hands. English Wikipedia lists Nanu Gupta as founder and chairman, with his sons Nilesh and Ashish Gupta and his grandson Karan Gupta as managing directors; the company’s own site says Karan Gupta joined the business in 2019 after working in its stores and has focused on its online shop. As of November 2026 the company’s site lists showrooms in Mumbai, Pune, Surat, Ahmedabad and Baroda in the west, in Delhi, Haryana and Noida, and in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Vijayawada and Warangal, and says it carries more than 5,000 products across more than 15 main categories.

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.

Home demonstrations, supplier ties and festival trading.

Vijay Sales tells its story through service. Nilesh Gupta, speaking as a director of the company, told Business Today in May 2026 that his father used to go to customers’ homes after closing the shop to demonstrate the products he had sold, and that he had advised the family to stay in a single business rather than spread itself across several. Outlook Business described the founder, then in his seventies, still visiting the Mumbai stores every month and, on busy days, helping out at the cash counter. The chain also built its business on credit from manufacturers: in the early years Gupta took goods on credit and paid only after they were sold, and where a brand such as Philips would not extend credit, he bought its stock with profits from other sales, the magazine reported.

Supplier relationships are part of that picture. Executives at LG India and Videocon told Outlook Business that their companies had long worked with the chain, and one recalled a relationship going back 25 years. The way customers pay has changed too. In October 2026 Nilesh Gupta told CNBC-TV18 that most purchases at the chain, 75 to 80 percent by his estimate, were financed through instalment schemes, by credit card or consumer finance, and he described the Navratri, Dussehra and Diwali weeks as the core of its trading year. He named robotic vacuum cleaners and air fryers as fast-growing home-appliance categories, particularly in the metro cities.

What the record shows is a name that moved from a single product, the television, to a general electronics showroom in 1981, and a chain that has kept one family name over its stores while adding cities and a second regional chain.

For a design guide, Vijay Sales shows how a family retailer can keep one name on its showrooms through decades of growth. Compare Croma, Tata’s electronics chain, and Reliance, whose group runs Reliance Digital. For this guide we use a showroom red, an ink blue and a warm white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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