Started as the distributor for footwear brands for all multinational brands, the founders of Centro couldn’t find a retail brand to sell their own merchandise. This led to the creation of Centro in 2009. Today, Centro is present in seven cities with twenty stores in Vijayawada, Hyderabad, Guntur, Vizag and Bangalore, with their new store coming up in Bangalore in December. Couple of Centro stores have larger area space where apparel is also displayed. Approximately 16 stores are only footwear store, while the other four stores offer apparel and footwear together. Centro offer a great mix of apparel and footwear; giving them an advantage over other stores as they offer both to the customer at one place.

Centro is a little large format footwear store as compared to other stores in Hyderabad expanding to one lakh thirty thousand square feet of area. Talking about the key points of business success, Bollam Sridhar Ganesh, Director, Centro tells its his understanding of customer’s needs & requirements and his experience of choosing the kind of footwear collection for the stores. Another USP of Centro is the availability of sizes of footwear, which is sometimes difficult for customers to find at footwear stores in general. All the Centro stores are located in the prime location, where great accessibility is another important factor that adds to the success of the brand.

With Centro’s large format stores they try to accommodate all the segments, where circulation of customer has to be seamless. Talking about the retail design, Mr Sridhar adds that it’s quite challenging for the designers and architects to design the space for the footwear shop, because the back up space is the key area for keeping the stock as it occupies thirty three percent of the total square feet area of the whole store. The architect and the director work in collaboration, to select the best color pallet, fixtures and lightings that needs to be put in the store. Lighting for their stores is sourced from Focus Lighting; Fixtures are sourced from contractor in Pune and Mumbai. They don’t have standardised vendors & contractor, and they keep trying new contractors with each project.