Most luxury brands are still treating India as a future market.
A nice roundtable topic. A country worth monitoring. Something to revisit in five years.
But the policy infrastructure has already arrived.
In October 2025, the EFTA-India TEPA came into force. Swiss watches entering India. Duty-free. Right now.
That one sentence rewrites the economics of Swiss watchmaking in the world's fastest-growing luxury market.
Then, in January 2026, the EU-India Free Trade Agreement was concluded after 18 years of negotiations. Wine duties falling from 150% to 20-40%. Cosmetics from 40-55% to zero. Watch duties: significantly reduced across the board. The EU called it the "mother of all deals": 2 billion consumers and 25% of global GDP.
Ratification is expected early 2027. The clock is ticking.
Let me explain what 150% to 20% actually means on the ground.
A €100 bottle of Champagne that currently retails for €350-400 in Mumbai could drop to €150-180 post-FTA. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a different market entirely.
A ₹50,000 watch facing 60% duties lands at ₹80,000. That pushes mainstream premium into ultra-luxury territory, pricing out India's enormous aspirational affluent segment. The FTA removes that ceiling. Not immediately, not all at once, but the direction is clear.
Some brands are not waiting for ratification.
Galeries Lafayette opened its first Indian store in Mumbai in November 2025. 90,000 sq ft across five floors of restored neoclassical buildings in Kala Ghoda. 250+ brands. 70% of them entering India for the first time. Their reasoning is simple: Indian shoppers are already among their top international clients in Paris. The demand was always there. The infrastructure is now catching up.
Titan presented its first flying tourbillon at GPHG 2025. The Jalsa. Ten pieces at €45,000 each. 105 of 144 components made in India, with a movement developed in partnership with a La Chaux-de-Fonds manufacturer and a dial painted by a Padma Shri laureate miniaturist using ancestral pigments and a single-hair brush.
India is not preparing to enter the luxury conversation. India is already in it.
The scale of the opportunity is worth sitting with.
India's luxury market sits at $8-10 billion today, growing at 10-12% annually, faster than any other major luxury market globally. Bain projects it reaching $85 billion by 2030. The middle class has 500 million people. The median age is under 30. A generation that is globally connected, digitally fluent, and hungry for brands that take them seriously.
The challenge has always been price. Import duties pushed products into a price bracket that only ultra-HNWIs could access. The FTA changes that arithmetic. It opens the aspirational affluent segment that has driven luxury growth in China and Southeast Asia for the past two decades.
Here is what I find most interesting.
The brands moving fastest are not the biggest ones. It is Galeries Lafayette, not a standalone LVMH flagship. It is Titan competing at GPHG before most Swiss brands have even localised their Indian campaigns. It is Reliance building the retail infrastructure while European brands deliberate on market entry strategies.
First-mover advantages in India compound differently than in mature markets. Brand recognition, distribution partnerships, consumer relationships. These take years to build. The FTA is removing the tariff barrier. The other barriers, presence, trust, local relevance, are about time.
I have been watching India closely since 2023. The pace of change is striking. It is not just trade policy. It is the Davos delegation of 4,000 people. It is 38,000 GPUs deployed at a third of global cost. It is a government that has shifted from "ease of doing business" to "speed of doing business."
The question is not whether India will become a major luxury market. It already is.
The question is which brands will have built genuine market presence before the tariff cuts make that obvious to everyone.
Does anyone know which European watch or jewellery brands are actively building India strategies right now? Genuinely curious what I'm missing.
Sources: EFTA-India TEPA (October 2025), EU-India FTA concluded January 2026, Bain & Company luxury market projections, Galeries Lafayette Mumbai opening reports, Titan/GPHG 2025, WEF Davos 2026.
