Starmark, an Emami Group venture, recently reopened its leisure and entertainment store at the South City Mall in Kolkata with a brand new look after the mall renovation. The retailer has six outlets so far in India, four in Kolkata and two in Chennai. Retail4Growth chatted with Gautam Jatia, CEO of Starmark, on the growth and scope of this category.

What is your take on book and leisure store retailing in the Indian market with respect to Starmark?

We are a family store or a leisure and entertainment store as we sell books, music, gift items, toys and stationeries, craft products everything. 

We don’t see any major growth of physical book stores across the country, what keeps Starmark going strong ?

It is not that people are not reading but the way people read have changed. May be someone likes to read in kindle, someone in mobile phone, or laptops etc. but at the same time there is still a large population who wants to read physical books. It is true that many of the book store chains have closed down but this is due to the reason that book stores cannot survive in the corporate environment. Unless rental comes down or with motive beyond profit making of the books are sold then only this business will endure. It has also been impacted due to the ecommerce portals giving lot of discounts on physical books.

Tell us something about the new look of this store.

The previous store had an open look. Here, this design is more of a discovery. We have kept partitions and cosy corners where one may browse through the books and sit at one corner and read and enjoy privacy. Also, here we do not have the false ceiling, thus it adds to the volume of the space. We have designed the space in collaboration with designers Anita Mansatta and Pranab Bhaduri. We will carry forward the same same design language in the upcoming stores. 

How are you looking at expansion?

We are getting lot of queries from Mumbai and we may look at expanding there.

What kind of customer engagement programmes do you do normally?

We keep having various events in the store, be it book launches, or kid’s creative writing workshops etc. Each time we get great responses from our customers.