Quintessentially international

Pondicherry as a location of the flagship store 

Pondicherry is the home of the Hidesign, and for us the flagship store of Hidesign should be able to express the history, the heritage, the story and the values of Hidesign. All the experimentation should take place there at first. When you visit the store, you should be able to experience the whole thing that is Hidesign - the cultural lifestyle, the history and everything. Pondicherry has these traits. The city depicts a lot of heritage and culture with old monuments and buildings. The flagship store there is doing extremely well. If you look at the numbers, they are excellent. Since the place sees a lot of international tourism along with people visiting from Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and other places in a good number, it becomes an extremely good place from the viewpoint of business. 

The prices here are slightly less and that is also because of the taxes levied by the state. Let’s say, if other parts of India have 14 per cent tax, Pondicherry has around 2 per cent.

Further expansion plans 

We have 18 stores planned for Hidesign this year, more than a dozen stores for Ayesha and six stores for Holli, Ayesha and Holli are the two new retail formats from Hidesign. Ludhiana, Jaipur, Delhi, Lucknow, Bangalore, Mumbai, Aurangabad, Mysore and Nagpur are some of the places where these stores will be opening.

Average sales conversion

Hidesign’s average footfall is around 75 a day resulting in an average of 25 bills a day. Some of Ayesha’s store gets 400-500 footfalls a day.

Franchising model: a challenge for us

I think for us the challenge in the franchise model in India is how to give the same experience to the franchised store.  We haven’t mastered it, haven’t simplified it yet; so with our own stores, constantly, we are struggling to keep them looking nice, keeping the windows nice, keeping the VM clean, the music right. I don’t think we have managed to systemise them yet. So, in most of our stores we are dependent on the judgement of the managers and the regional directors. But in Russia, our all the seven stores are franchised, even in the US, and the three stores that we have in Vietnam.  In Vietnam, a distributor takes up franchise and sets up the store. We are not much involved, apart from designing the stores. We design the full stores ourselves, we give the franchisees the specification for furniture and then they make the stores. We are not involved in the running of the store. In India, if we do franchising, we start worrying about it.

In fact, when we are planning to open more stores in the tier II cities, we are also thinking about how to manage these stores because management again becomes an issue. We are not even sure if Hidesign would sell in tier II cities like Bhopal and Indore. Hidesign sells in cities where there is an international exposure. International exposure forms the heart of the Hidesign experience. Hidesign sells in places like Cochin, Goa, Pondicherry where people are travelling in and out of the country and are exposed to the west. We had a tough time in Punjab selling a Hidesign bag.

Punjab: an over-hyped market

People in Punjab would rather go for a brand like a Louis Vuitton than a Hidesign. Punjab is the most over-hyped market. Every store owner admits that. We are yet to open one in Jalandhar; we have a store in Ludhiana, Amritsar and Chandigarh. Chandigarh is doing okay.  In Amritsar, Shoppers Stop has come up with a big store which is not doing well, as reported. I think reason behind the same is, which we got as the feedback, that a lot of people think that the mall experience is not the same as it is in the metros, say, shopping experience in a Select Citywalk or the DLF Emporio would be different from one in Jalandhar. People have easy access to the metros and there is a notion that brands have better collections in the metros than their tier II counterparts. Even in cities like Ludhiana or Amritsar, a woman would most probably prefer a glamorous and a jazzy looking bag and that is because the corporate culture has yet to flourish there.

I think the southern part of India has been lucky for us in that sense. The region has the connection with Silicon Valley, and because of all the IT boom happening there, someone from every middle class family has been going abroad, living there, working there and has the exposure that is necessary to connect with the brand Hidesign.

Markets elsewhere

We are present in Calcutta with three stores. These stores are doing satisfactory business. We opened an outlet in Guwahati. The market has an exposure to the west; so, we’re hopeful about the market.

Importance of airport retailing

For us airport retailing is very important, as most of our customers are frequenter to airports. My customers travel all the time. We want to be at every airport. We are there at Cochin international airport, at both domestic and international airports of Bangalore, at international and domestic airports in Hyderabad and Mumbai, and at the existing domestic airport in New Delhi. Now with T3 coming up in New Delhi, we will be present there through Kimaya.

Internet, the preferred medium for promotion

We are very significantly present in the print media. We are going out more on the Internet, since I like its interactive nature, we like listening to people, like all the complaints we have. They come directly to me. We are also available on Youtube. But, we don’t promote on TV. I think it’s too mass

No loyalty programme

We don’t have any such loyalty programmes. We think about it all the time, but we can’t figure out how to go about it. I think, we are not a Shoppers Stop, where the customers drop in all the time. Here a good customer would come to see us twice in a month at the max. What kind of a loyalty programme would make a sense then? We keep track of our customers and have a big database. We communicate with them; we offer them special privileges but not a loyalty programme.

Malls, any day preferred over high street

More than anything else, I don’t like individual landlords who do not understand what modern retail is. I would rather go for malls which understand what modern retail is all about. Individual landlords need a lot of babysitting.

Interviewed by Suranjana Basu & Varun Jain