Flemingo, airport retail store operator, to sell products online

Flemingo will soon start selling its products online. The company which operates airport retail stores across various countries will be focusing on luxury brands. It has no plans to compete with the likes of Flipkart and Amazon.

In order to differentiate itself from others, Flemingo will host ‘Trunk Shows’ in customers’ living rooms or office conference rooms. This is aimed at customers who are too busy to step out to buy a Porsche Design product. For them, the company will bring a trunk to their office or home and display the merchandise there. The service, as Arjun Ahuja, MD, Flemingo Airport Retail says, will be initially available to those customers who have shopped at Flemingo’s Porsche Design store at the Mumbai domestic airport.

Domestic airport retail business has a lot more potential than duty-free business. Ahuja explains that they have done transactions at their duty-paid shops that were higher than the transactions that were ever done at their duty-free shops. Many passengers have spent as high as Rs 8 lakh on a single bill at Mumbai domestic airport. And interestingly, their biggest customers have been people from smaller cities such as Surat, Agra, Nagpur and Jaipur. At the Porsche Design store the average size of transaction is Rs 28,000.

Flemingo, which is among the largest duty-free operators in the world, entered duty-paid business in 2004 and currently runs 14 stores. It hopes to grow its annual business from Rs 20 crores presently to about Rs 100 crores by the end of the year. The company is betting big on large airport retail contracts that will go for tender this year.