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: competing national brand or brands in the category. It’s working well for some of them.

Take Big Bazaar, for instance. The sales, says Kishore Biyani, chief executive officer, Future Group, of its various in-house apparel brands at the hypermarket is about 60-65%. General merchandise is about 40%, electronics and food is about 18-20%. “If you take into account grocery and staples in the foods category,” says Biyani, “Then the figure goes up to about 30%. For us, private labels are serious business. We don’t take it lightly.”

Retailers such as Biyani have made their mark with private labels much like Trent has. It is natural then for him to devote his time and attention to in-house brands. Future Group’s flagship company, Pantaloon Retail stores, which is primarily into fashion wear, began selling private labels way back in the 1990s and continues to maintain a high percentage of these products, as high as 70-75%, according to Biyani. Rajan Raheja group’s Globus is another store that has devoted much of its attention to private labels.

At its massive Mumbai store in the suburb of Bandra, for instance, the entire ground floor is dedicated to the latter. The situation is no different with the Delhi-based retailer Vishal Mega Mart or the Mumbai-based HyperCity Retail or even newer players such as Aditya Birla Retail or Reliance Retail.

For many, private labels are their unique selling proposition—their distinctive style that helps them to differentiate their offerings from the others. As Gibson Vedamani, chief executive officer, Retailers Association of India, explains, “With private labels, a retailer can bring exclusivity to the merchandise mix. It helps in setting apart one retailer from the other, otherwise all multi-brand retail operations would appear the same.”

This point is reiterated by Anand of HyperCity, “Exclusive brands do help to differentiate your product offering. It does help.” At HyperCity, for instance, the retailer offers an assortment of international cheese, hygienically packed meat and fish all under private labels.

If all of this imparts exclusivity to a retailer’s merchandise, setting it up is akin to a science. Most retailers today are paying attention to minute details when launching private labels. From where the product is being sourced, what need gaps does it address, is the packaging and branding right, are consumers interested in the product etc.