Reliance Brands to add more stores with more brands

Reliance Brands continues to open new stores and tie up with more brands to expand its portfolio horizontally to offer more categories. An arm of Reliance Industries, Reliance Brands sells affordable luxury and premium brands in India. The company owns the biggest chunk of the mid- to high-end of the fashion market. Setting up luxury stores can be expensive. While it can quickly achieve store-level positive ebitda margins, it will take a while to achieve profit after tax. Reliance Brands had to build the affordable luxury market in India from scratch. It had to build the market horizontally in various categories—clothing, shoes, accessories, home, mother care, etc.— and it brought in non-competing brands so that it could occupy as much mind space as possible.

Reliance Brands has 100 Hamleys stores. Likewise Superdry has 100 points of sale. Steve Madden too has more than 100 points of sale. Gas has 80 sales points. Over the years, the company has created alternative channels like home shopping and trunk shows for its brands. Brands like Hugo Boss and Michael Kors are sold through e-commerce. This is not a discount model. The online partner picks up the pricing through software from the company’s databases and then delivers the inventory in store to the customer. So this is basically optimising the store inventory through online sales.