US accessories brand Michael Kors has opened a new store at the GVK ONE mall in Hyderabad, an IT hub in southern India. Operations are run by Reliance Brands, which runs a large number of overseas brands in India. This move, as luxury brand openings that had tended to concentrate in Delhi and Mumbai spread to major southern cities like Hyderabad, offers material for thinking about which Indian city a Japanese luxury brand should target next. Here is who, where, and what is being sold, organized to the extent confirmable from reporting.
According to Indian Retailer (September 5, 2026), the new Michael Kors store sits on the ground floor of Hyderabad's GVK ONE mall, alongside brands such as Tira and Armani Exchange. It carries handbags, shoes, watches, accessories, and a curated ready-to-wear line. The opening was supported by Reliance Brands, which runs brands in India, and its team, including Suvneet Ahuja and Tarun Mehra, is reported to have been involved in the launch. Store size, total domestic store count, and investment amount were not disclosed in the reporting.
Alongside its concentration of IT industry, Hyderabad's disposable income has been rising, thickening the consumer base able to support luxury brands. Indian luxury brands had traditionally tended to cluster in Delhi and Mumbai, but major southern cities are gaining presence as new store locations. Michael Kors's choice of GVK ONE can be read as a move to capture the traffic of this southern city's affluent and upper-middle class. "Accessible luxury" items like handbags and watches are a category where demand tends to take off even outside the two biggest cities.
What's worth noting about this opening is not the brand itself, but the local partner running operations. Reliance Brands operates many overseas brands in India and has accumulated know-how in site selection, mall negotiations, and store operations. Rather than an overseas brand tackling the whole country alone, partnering with a local operator like this and opening cities one at a time makes it easier to secure reproducibility in store openings. The brand contributes its name and merchandise, while the local operator contributes location and operations — this division of labor is becoming the standard way to enter India's luxury retail market.
Indian Retailer presents this opening as one example of Hyderabad rising as a luxury retail market alongside growing disposable income, and drawing in overseas brands. The article carries no figures such as sales targets or store counts, and no direct comments from individuals. This account stops at the confirmed fact — that a luxury accessories store opened at a high-traffic mall in a major southern city — without asserting reaction or results beyond what has been published.
When a Japanese luxury brand (bags, watches, cosmetics, and so on) pushes into India, which city to take after Delhi and Mumbai becomes the question. A major southern city like Hyderabad, built on an IT industry backdrop, is growing into a home for luxury goods, and partnering with a local operator can raise the reproducibility of store openings. Luxury brands have already been entering southern cities one after another; for more detail, Juicy Couture's new Hyderabad store and TAG Heuer's first franchise boutique in India offer useful reference. A design that sells through brand experience rather than the product alone, like Tory Burch's café-attached store, selling the world of a handbag brand through experience, also pays off when expanding into southern cities.
Michael Kors's southern opening confirms a trend of Indian luxury retail spreading from a Delhi-Mumbai duopoly to multiple cities. It overlaps with a trend of overseas cosmetics brands clustering in NCR's luxury malls, such as those in Gurugram, with competition to capture affluent consumer traffic broadening city by city. It is worth also watching the move by NARS's new Gurugram store for reference.
Michael Kors's Hyderabad opening is a concrete example of luxury brands spreading into major southern cities. If a Japanese luxury brand wants to move, the recommended first step is not a simultaneous nationwide push, but opening and testing a single store in "the next one city" after Delhi and Mumbai, borrowing a local operator's location data and negotiating power. It is the sounder approach to confirm traction with one store in a city with rising disposable income — southern India, or NCR's suburbs — before adding more cities.
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