Caratlane: Anatomy of a glittering exit

Mumbai/ New Delhi: He started his business in 2008, at the height of the Lehman Brothers collapse, and he’s walking away in 2023, at the height of the startup funding winter. Sacheti agreed to sell his 27% stake in Caratlane to Titan for over ₹4,621 crore on Saturday, in a deal that will take the latter’s stake in the business to over 98%, and value Caratlane at over ₹17,000 crore. “Caratlane is a high-quality, high-growth business built by Mithun Sacheti from scratch—it has a richer gross margin profile vs Tanishq’s and at steady-state could possibly be clocking a higher operating margin than Tanishq. For instance, Caratlane opened its first offline store in 2011 in Delhi’s upmarket Greater Kailash area after the first round of funding from Tiger Global. That financial year, Caratlane registered a turnover of ₹2,169 crore against the previous year’s ₹1,256 crore and recorded a profit before tax of ₹119 crore against the previous year’s ₹39 crore.