Inside Go Colors’ retail growth strategy

In this exclusive conversation, Gautam Saraogi, Founder & CEO of Go Colors, shares how the brand is balancing deeper market penetration with thoughtful expansion, reimagining its retail experience, and driving growth without cannibalising its own network.

From establishing itself as India's go-to bottomwear brand to evolving into a destination for everyday womenswear essentials, Go Colors has steadily expanded both its product offering and retail vision. As the brand moves beyond its core category, it is reimagining the in-store experience for customers today. While its compact store format played a pivotal role in driving rapid expansion, Go Colors is now embracing larger 700–800 sq. ft. stores to accommodate a wider assortment and new categories, enabling greater self-discovery and shopping convenience. In this conversation, Gautam Saraogi, Founder & CEO, Go Colors talks about balancing deeper market penetration with thoughtful expansion, all while ensuring growth without cannibalising its own network.

Bottom wear has been the core of Go Colors since it started, and you've now moved into top wear and everyday essentials. Has it shifted how consumers perceive the brand?

Bottom wear remains a category that has done well for us, and we see a good contribution from this for the company’s growth. The move into top wear actually came from customer feedback and them asking for it. Since bottom wear is such a core, everyday essential category, we felt the same approach could work for top wear too.

We're not getting into fast fashion for women the way some other brands have. Our focus is on basic staples in top wear. Because the bottom wear business was doing well, we decided to pilot this. Any pilot takes a few years to settle, but if it works, it becomes a new growth engine altogether. We rolled it out in about 20 large format stores. A customer coming in for bottom wear now also sees core, basic top wear and often buys it as an additional item. The response so far has been very encouraging. Since this is our first season, our merchandising is still evolving, which I expect to strengthen over the coming seasons, and start reflecting more clearly in our numbers too.

Go Colors built its visibility primarily through offline retail. How do you see this evolving?

It has evolved well. We've graduated our retail format for bottom wear. Earlier, the category itself was narrower, limited to fewer products, so a straightforward 200–300 sq. ft. store format worked fine. Over the last six to seven years, the bottom wear category has expanded significantly with a much wider variety now, and a 300 sq. ft. store can no longer showcase that full range.

So we've moved to larger formats of 600-800 sq. ft. stores. We're currently at 800+ stores overall, and in many of our existing markets, we're consolidating by shutting two or three smaller stores (say, 200 sq. ft. each) and opening one larger store (around 700 sq. ft.) in their place. The total square footage deployed doesn't shrink but actually grows, even though the store count falls. Our square footage deployed should keep growing at over 10% year-on-year.

The classic Go Colors store experience used to be very simple - walk in, pick up bottomwear from the colour block display style, pay up and leave. Is this evolving?

That model hasn't disappeared, but it has evolved with the value-added products we've introduced. It's still need-based shopping, but now there's more exploration happening too. Customers are browsing new categories rather than just walking in for a specific need.

Earlier, a customer typically needed help from store staff to navigate color and product selection from stacked garments. We're moving toward a more self-shopping model, since the category itself has become more fashion-oriented rather than purely functional.

What specific experience layers have you added inside Go Colors stores?

Visual merchandising is moving away from blocks of folded garments (the older format) toward a more visually appealing, modern display that customers can browse and self-shop, with or without staff assistance.

Secondly, the store's external facade matters as much as the product inside, so a 20–25 ft. wide, tall, inviting storefront draws a customer inside.

Beyond that, we keep things simple and focus on three things: People, Product, Place. Getting the best people on the shop floor, picking the right locations, and continuously evolving the product as the bottom wear category itself evolves.

Have dwell times in stores increased as a result?

We're trying to increase that. We don't currently measure time spent by customers at the store level, though we're introducing some AI technology to capture that data. Historically, dwell time has been quite short. As the fashion quotient of the category rises, we expect customers spending more time in store.

How have same-store sales growth (SSSG) trends looked for your older stores?

SSSG has genuinely struggled over the last 12 months. One reason was that our smaller stores couldn't replicate the bottom-wear experience that a larger store offers, which constrained growth. We've addressed this by transitioning to larger formats (the 700–800 sq. ft. stores), and we're now seeing improvement. We're currently at a mid-single-digit negative SSSG, but expect to move toward positive in the coming quarters now that we understand and have fixed the underlying issue.

What are the brand's growth plans? What are the new markets or untapped regions on the radar?

We've historically been a large-city brand with more than 60% of our business coming from the top 10 cities. Going forward, establishing ourselves in tier 2 and tier 3 cities is going to be a key focus area. That said, even in our large-city markets, our market share is still small, so there's plenty of room to grow there too. But going deeper into newer territories and tier 2/3 markets will be a major part of our expansion strategy in the coming years.

We're strongest in South and West regions of India, largely because 7–8 of our top 10 cities fall in these regions. Delhi and Kolkata are also strong markets for us, comparable to Mumbai, Hyderabad, or Chennai. Our penetration in North and East India is comparatively lower, partly because those regions have fewer large cities relative to South and West.

Tell us about your presence in international markets and expansion plans.

We have one store in Dubai, run through a franchise partner, as we don't follow the COCO model overseas. That store has seen decent traction over time, but it's still early days. Once we see sales stabilizing there, we'll consider expanding further. International expansion is on our radar, but not a high priority right now.

What's been Go Colors' biggest challenge in store build-out and entering new locations?

For any retail brand, location is the key factor, and maintaining that discipline consistently, whether early in the journey or at a mature stage, matters a lot. I've seen brands take strong locations initially and then shift to second or third-tier locations as they scale for rental savings. Location consistency has to remain a priority throughout.

The second challenge is the fine line between penetration and cannibalization. When a brand is growing at 20–25% SSSG, there's a temptation to assume that growth rate will continue indefinitely, and adding stores aggressively can end up cannibalizing your own sales. But that doesn't mean you stop expanding — it's about finding the right balance.

I'd also add that sometimes the better move isn't opening more stores, but making existing stores bigger. Today's customers shopping offline want experience, range, and depth; otherwise, there's little reason not to just order online. The real hook to bring customers into a physical store is the experience itself. In offline retail today, the experience a store offers matters more than sheer network/store-count penetration.