With the soaring number of women workforce in India, who are splurging not only on themselves but also on kids and families, retailers in India are courting them with special focus.
Earlier this year, Planet Retail transformed its men?s centric department store Debenhams into a women-focused outlet by skewing the merchandise in favour of women. At present, women products as a category contribute about 65% of Debenhams sales as against 40% last year. At Shoppers Stop where same-store-sales are growing at about 9% annually, women?s categories are growing by 25%.
?Women were driving the unorganised sector and now they are fuelling the growth of modern retailing,? says Aditya Nadkarni, business head for Debenhams. Govind Shrikhande, managing director of Shoppers Stop, echoes the sentiments.
Retailers as well as experts attribute the growth in women-centric retailing to a huge number of women entering the corporate workforce every year. According to Technopak Advisor, there are about 10 million urban women in the age group of 20-40 in managerial jobs in the country and the number is expected to swell five-fold to 50 million by 2020.
?This will have direct impact on spending,? says Saloni Nangia, vice-president for retail and consumer products at Technopak. Nangia says working women spend 35% more on themselves than homemakers, fuelling the growth of various range of personal and wellness products to kids products to family holidays. ?The whole consumerism pie is increasing because of them,? Nangia says. That segment with more disposable income is splurging on everything from their children to family holidays, she says.
Shrikhande of Shoppers Stop says ten years ago most of the working women population would wear salwar kameez to offices and currently 50% of them would go to their offices in western attire prompting many organised players to increase western wear as part of their portfolio and initiate more tie ups with foreign brands. In colleges, almost 90% of female students wear western wear, he says. That is boosting the sales of various products such as handbags, footwear, western wear, beauty products among others.
Shrikhande says women customers tend to be choosy, but remain loyal to brands they like than their male counterparts.
Three years ago, Shoppers Stop had three counters each for Estee Lauder, Mac and Clinique and currently its has thirty counters and standalone stores for each brands.
When Select Citywalk Mall in New Delhi?s Saket locality was in its conceiving stage, promoters had one clear idea: to target lady shoppers of south. The promoter courted traditional ethnic stores like Zardozi and Fab India even as they signed up global brands like Espirit, Mango and French Connections among others in a bid to appeal to a wider section of the lady shoppers. Today, almost 75% of the mall?s merchandise is women-centric and 60% of Select Citywall?s footfalls is women. On the other side of Delhi, Shipra Mall in Indirapuram has reserved the front side of the mall for lady shoppers.
Lifestyle International, the department store chain of Dubai-based Landmark Group, says it at present about 40% its total sales come from women products and the figure is expected to jump to 47% in the next three years. ?More and more women are moving for unorganised retail to organise retail,? says Kabir Lumba, managing director of Lifestyle.