Eyeing South
Eyeing South

Bianca Home has emerged as a home furnishing brand in India. A journey which started off as an exporter is now making waves in the domestic retail segment also. Hitel Dalal, Director, Bianca Home shares his future plans for the company.

What has been the journey of Bianca Home?

Bianca Home is the retail arm of Mangal Exports. We have been into the export of home textiles and handicraft products from past 30 years, mainly to USA. In 2009, we entered the domestic retail market for home furnishing with our brand Bianca. Bianca is an Italian name and stands for white.

We intially started off with selling all the designs and products which we were exporting to international market and then looking at how the market is responding, we discarded the slow moving designs and after one year looking at response we started manufacturing designs specifically for the Indian market, keeping in mind the trends and festivals. So it brought us more closer to the domestic customers.

What is your retail presence in India?

We have dealer and distributor division, wherein we have distributors in different states who takes care of dealers of that particular state. We have about 11 distributors and more than 150 dealers across India. Another medium we move well in is the large format stores including WellHome, Bombay Store etc. We supply to different centres of these chain stores.

Thirdly we also have exclusive Bianca Home stores, which are presently two in number, each in Mumbai and Pune.

 

What is plan for the expanding retail presence of Bianca Home?

We are adding more and more distributors and are looking for distributors down south which is still an untapped market for us. We are eyeing places including Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and majorly through large format chain stores in these regions. We have about 30-35 shop-in-shops space and now we are targeting 50-55 shop-in-shops stores. These shop-in-shops offer our products, have complete stocks. These spaces also have our promoter who also takes care of space. We also refill the stocks keeping a track of the daily sales happening.

For exclusive stores, we are moving slow, as we are concentrated more on supply chain. We plan to open three stores of Bianca Home, one each in Gujarat, Mumbai and third in Bangalore or Delhi. Whole purpose of store is to bring to the consumers full range of Bianca as these stores act as our gallery.

These stores are company owned and the one’s planned for future would be company owned. In terms of size our two stores are of 800 sq ft and 500 sq ft, respectively and for future stores we will be looking at a store size between 800-1000sq ft.

How do you promote your brand?

We invest judicially in promoting, advertising our products and also do a lot of in-shop branding. While for advertising we have a lot of flyers in terms of promotions we have schemes, wherein we offer one on one free or give discounts on certain amount of purchase. Moreover, specifically for in-shop, we become a part of end of season sale or festive sales.

 

What is the price range you are currently working on and who are your target audience?

Our target audience has been the upper middle class and we offer products starting from Rs 1000.

Where is your manufacturing facility? Do you plan to raise the capacity?

We are based in Mumbai and do our product fabrication and packaging here while the fabric and other expertise come from all across India including Haryana, Tamil Nadu and other regions of down south.

We also have a factory in south and some of the factories are manufacturing exclusively for us. At present we have enough capacity and can handle even three times of the current demand.

What next do we see in terms of products?

We are doing a lot of product innovations; soon we will be launching product range which will be economically priced as the demand is becoming high of these products. We have received feedback from our distributors and dealers that the demand of economically priced products in rising so we will launching products priced between Rs 500-Rs 1000. We plan to make this as our fast moving range.

 

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