It’s the fashion!

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: first youth brand we launched was Buffalo, and it has shown some very good results,” says Malhotra. The private labels were never advertised, because they were always based on product and prices.

The Fashion at Big Bazaar ad campaign aims to increase sales of the fashion products in the sales mix by six percentage points, says a company executive. “We have already achieved close to four percentage points. Once we get to six percentage points, our profit margins would increase by two percentage points,” he adds.

Big Bazaar has always been present in the apparel segment with private labels like DJ&C and Knighthood, among others. Today, DJ&C is already a Rs 250-crore brand, and is gunning for a target of Rs 1,000 crore by 2009-10. Knighthood, now a Rs 100-crore brand, should go up to Rs 150 crore within a few years.

At Spencer’s, the floor space given to fashion within each large format store will be increased to at least 25% of the total. “We will be looking at a quarter of the store coming under fashion,” says Sheikhawat pointing out that the change has already taken place at its large format stores in Gurgaon, and Ghaziabad (another Delhi suburb) and Baroda, where the share is 35%.

Differentiating the future

Fashion will be one of the key differentiators in the retails business, says Big Bazaar’s Malhotra. “Apart from fashion all the other products are things that can be replicated by anyone. So fashion will be the core competency,” he says.

So what will be the differentiator for Spencer’s? Pat comes the barbed reply: “We are not high fashion, at the same time we are not sab se sasta or is se sasta. We are affordable fashion,” he says.

Internally, Big Bazaar does not see any clash with sister format Pantaloons as it moves up the value chain. “We do not see a cannibalisation between Big Bazaar and Pantaloons, since they cater to different audiences at different price points, with different brands available in the respective formats. Also, Big Bazaar has over 90 stores today and Pantaloons has 35,” says a Pantaloons official.

The key, as Big Bazaar’s Malhotra says, is to get the consumer to allocate a larger chunk of his wallet for fashion. “If you look at the total consumption of apparel in the consumer shopping wallet, its actually very low, even for a growing economy like India,” says Malhotra.