Tell us about your store presence and the number of stores you plan to add.

Currently, our retail presence is spread across 75 standalone stores and 400 SISs. We generally add 40-50 points of sale every year. Today, it’s a necessity to expand store network for every brand and retailer. However, it’s important for us not to engage in reckless scaling but to spread across strategic locations.

Talking about expansion and locations, you have been strengthening your retail presence in smaller towns. What’s your take on these markets?

Yes, as all of us would know, smaller towns have proved themselves to be emerging and promising markets. As we are working towards, better retail design and VM, we are giving more importance to enhancing our stores’ look-and-feel in these markets. We have recently revamped the look of our store in Coimbatore and the response has been very good.

How do you differentiate between store formats and how importance is VM in retail design?

Our store sizes range between 1200 sq ft to 2000 sq ft. We incorporate most elaborate store design concept in our bigger stores, which are close to 2000 sq ft in size and are present in key markets. Recently, we have brought new materials of fixtures in our retail design. As for VM, I think that it’s all the more important today because of steady growth of e-commerce channels. It’s imperative for us to step up visual merchandising vis-à-vis online retail, which has bigger opportunity simply by the virtue of the vastness of space. It’s cumbersome and costly to execute good VM presentations in physical stores, but we must keep at it in order to stay abreast with the competition.