Tantra: Plans exclusive T-shirt only stores

Tucking several plans under its belt Tantra, the T-shirt company, wants to open T-shirts only stores housing T-shirt labels apart from their own brand. The company is scouting for partners to realize this dream. Explains Ranjiv Ramchandani,

Director, Tantra, “I would be interested in T-shirt shops where you get not only Tantra but other labels. For Tantra, the tasks are multi-fold. To start with, the energy and the momentum created, has to be further channelized and broad-banded into a larger lifestyle. Secondly, the equity and trust built with our customers need to be further consolidated by upgrading the core product giving more value and bang for the bucks. And, thirdly, we need to ensure that when ‘change’ happens, it doesn’t endanger the core values of the brand. ‘Big’ doesn’t need to be ‘bad’. In other words, the magic needs preserving.”

Kicking off its journey in 1997 with an idea to put India on a T-shirt, the company ventured into the market with the totally new concept. “None of the big brands was doing anything creative on a T-shirt. We started doing India as a concept on a T-shirt. And that’s how we started to bring about a change in the marketplace. When we started people couldn’t believe we could talk to the consumer in this fashion. We just broke the mould in terms of what was acceptable then,” elaborates Ramchandani.

Citing that the challenge was not reaching out to the customer but convincing the dealers and middle-men, the company began directly communicating with the consumers with its innovative range. Adds Ramchandani, “The challenge was to explain to the dealers that we are not selling the color, or fabric but are selling the content on the T-shirt. But that was also dissolved as people started approaching stores in Mumbai and elsewhere for our brand and the store owners started landing up at our shop all the way from Goa, Delhi and elsewhere. They didn’t know why the products were selling but they were buying it. For a change the retailer had no say in what the consumer was buying. So we cut him out of the loop.”

Apart from Tantra, the company has created other labels like Barking Dogs having global themes, Line Maro for men have clever lines and there’s another brand called Loose Motions. ‘This has separate marketing, separate distributors. We are working with a channel called 9X. They have created T-shirts which use our distribution channel. We are doing forward link-ups with other corporates,” Ramchandani adds.

Although Tantra is centred in India, it caters to the global youth of the world. The target audience is the cutting-edge cool early adopter, from Mumbai to Miami. Because the brand language and attitude is global, it appeals to a wide demographic range: from locals to expats. In fact, Tantra’s celebrity customer list includes Bill Clinton, Sir Paul Mc Cartney, Sting and Deepak Chopra.

The range is also available in MBOs across the country in places like Bangalore, Guwahati, Jaipur, Chennai. Ramchandani states, “In Mumbai, we are in 30 to 40 MBOs and we have a total of 45 to 50 exclusive outlets. We have three exclusive outlets in Mumbai. We just opened one at Nagpur recently. We are opening two at Delhi. We are in large formats like Central and Shoppers Stop. We have our own website for online sales and a heavy demand comes from non-metros. A lot of our stores cater to smaller towns like Kota and Udaipur.”