Little Shop expands its footprint with more stores in Eastern markets

Little Shop, the Kolkata based kidswear brand which has been in organised retail business for fifty years now, is continuously increasing its retail footprint in the eastern markets. “Looking at the growing segment of the kidswear and kids related products, we are very optimistic about the future of this sector. We have also recently opened our 11th store in Kolkata and will be adding two more stores in this financial year. In total we have 9 stores in Kolkata and 2 in Howrah. Being in the organised retail sector for such long time our experience says that if you give good product in a reasonable price it will definitely become your usp and we believe Little Shop has always maintained that. Our first store was in New Market and then we expanded in new age shopping malls like our store started in Forum Mall and then expanded to 5,000 sq. ft. stores at South City Mall and Mani Square Mall. We are planning on opening a store in April 2017 at City Centre1 Salt Lake and one in Unitech Downtown Mall by the end of the year,” says Shiv Hiro Daswani, Partner Little Shop.
 
Little Shop follows its own retail design which gets executed by their Mumbai based architect and has all the state of the art fixtures and visual merchandising elements coming from Mumbai as well. “We have a standard retail design from our team and more or less all our stores are within 3000-5000 sq. ft. giving the customers a good browsing area and an ambience needed for comfortable shopping,” adds Daswani.
 
The brand also has presence in the online space but they do not sell the discounted items there mentions Shiv. “To be successful in the online business, we believe one needs to have an aggressive pricing strategy. Little Shop is really not in a valuation game, and hence we find it tough to give huge rebates to get clicks online. We choose to channelize our drive in the brick-and-mortar commerce as it’s a more worthwhile business model for us,” says Daswani.
 
When asked if the brand was hit due to demonetisation, Daswani shares, “Initially Demonetisation did hit the business, but sales picked up again in December 2016 and by January, business was back on path as far as expenditure in the kidswear segment is concerned. Little Shop has always seen steady growth in the business over the years because we fall in the need and value based category, not the luxury segment, so we managed to endure demonetization quite smoothly. However, after this drive the payment modalities have changed immensely and there is no hesitation in saying that people are using debit and credit cards more than ever before and this is also better for us because it means less cash transaction,”