Xerxes Desai was the first managing director of

Titan Company Titan Company Limited is an Indian company that mainly manufactures fashion accessories such as jewellery, watches and eyewear. Part of the Tata Group and started as a joint venture with the TIDCO, the company has its corporate headquarters in ...

, an Indian watchmaking company, and played an instrumental role in laying the foundation of the company.

Biography

Desai was a graduate of

Elphinstone College Elphinstone College is one of the constituent colleges of Dr. Homi Bhabha State University, a state cluster university. Established in 1823, it is one of the oldest colleges in Mumbai. It played a major role in shaping and developing the ed ...

( Mumbai University) and

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to th ...

. Desai joined

Tata Administrative Services The Tata Group () is an Indian multinational conglomerate headquartered in Mumbai. Established in 1868, it is India's largest conglomerate, with products and services in over 150 countries, and operations in 100 countries across six continents ...

in 1961 after graduation, working at several of their companies. He founded Titan as a joint venture with

J. R. D. Tata Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata (29 July 1904 – 29 November 1993) was a French-Indian aviator, industrialist, entrepreneur and chairman of Tata Group. Born into the Tata family of India, he was the son of noted businessman Ratanji Dadabhoy ...

in 1986, with support from the

Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO) is a governmental agency in the state of Tamil Nadu, India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies ...

. He had suggested the idea of a watchmaking company to Tata in the 1970s, who liked it, but bureaucratic hassles took time till the company was opened in 1986 in Hosur. In 1994, Desai challenged engineers at Titan to design the world's thinnest watch, with a movement 1.15mm thick inside a 3.5mm case. The watch, called the Titan Edge was introduced in 2002. After Titan's success, Desai founded

Tanishq Tanishq is an Indian jewellery brand and a division of Titan Company. Founded in 1994, Tanishq is headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. History By the end of the 1980s, the Titan company launched Tanishq. In the early 1990s, India' ...

, a jewelry brand. He had innovative ideas like asking people in Bangalore to get their jewelry appraised in 1999. The jewelry business grew over time, after a slow start. Desai retired in 2002, and was succeeded by his protégé Bhaskar Bhat.

Post retirement

Desai was awarded a Lifetime Achievement award by the

National Institute of Design The National Institutes of Design (NIDs) are a group of autonomous public design universities in India, with the primary institute, founded in 1961, in Ahmedabad, with extension campuses in Gandhinagar and Bengaluru. The other NIDs are loc ...

during its 4th Design Excellence Awards in 2006. Post retirement, Desai was a part of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) initiative by

Nandan Nilekani Nandan Mohanrao Nilekani (born 2 June 1955) is an Indian entrepreneur. He co-founded Infosys and is the non-executive chairman of Infosys replacing R Seshasayee and Ravi Venkatesan, who were the co-chairs of the board, on 24 August 2017. After t ...

Death

Desai died from illness in

Bangalore Bangalore (), List of renamed places in India, officially Bengaluru (), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan area, metropolitan population of a ...

, where he had lived for 30 years, on 27 June 2016, at the age of 79.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Desai, Xerxes 2016 deaths Alumni of the University of Oxford Parsi people Tata Group people Watchmakers (people) 1937 births Titan Company