Maintaining positive growth on Desi Belle’s agenda

Women’s fusion wear brand Desi Belle is ready with its Fall/Winter range. While Sharmila Nadkarni, Founder, Desi Belle, believes that the coming season will also be a challenge in terms of business, since the market has slowed down, she believes it’s going to be another year for everybody in the industry to maintain growth as well as price points.

For Fall/Winter season, the brand has experimented with a lot of new fabrics like fancy knits and prints. “Each and every print is designed by our design team and every print is aligned with the colour trending in the market. So, we have an ongoing research that keeps happening, which is unique to our brand,” informs Nadkarni.

Indo-westerns woo New Age woman

The reason, why Desi Belle ventured into the Indo-western segment was the changing dynamics of domestic customers. The company saw the potential with women moving away from traditional to western world and the need for transitional garment was felt significantly. That’s the reason why Desi Belle launched a label to fill the gap.

“We thought of coming up with a brand that could exclusively deal with the Indo-western segment where our client base will be young women who wish to transit from traditional to western brand. We took only two months to conceptualise the whole project and it’s been nearly two years since we launched and growth has been phenomenal. Every year we are clocking in almost double the sales,” opines Nadkarni.

The portfolio consists of everything that goes under the transitional segment. The brand first started making only tunics and tops but now also offers leggings, plazos, skirts and the like.

EBO expansion on cards

Desi Belle is available across 80 large format stores, and approximately 250 MBOs. “We work with many distributors, so the number of MBOs can be around 500 to 1,000,” informs Nadkarni, adding, “We are starting our first EBO in Goa this July and next year, we plan to open five more stores. We are present is all states, so it’s just expansion within those states which we are looking at.”

The brand as of now is not very active online. Citing the reasons behind this, Nadkarni says, “Since online became a marketplace, we realised there is a lot that needs to be done before we actually see results. I do not want to treat online as a dumping ground for unsold goods, which most are doing. I want to give my brand six months to let the market stabilise and then move on to it. I don’t think we just need to be there for the need of being there.”