Star Bazaar focuses on ethnic private labels for festive season

Tata Group’s Trent Hypermarket, which operates Star

Bazaar, is planning to focus on its ethnics under private labels. It plans to offer affordable merchandise since prices of private labels are generally 20-25 per cent less than other brands and also to cash in on the festival season.

Of late, Star Bazaar has been focussing on increasing its private label offerings to get better margins and also to improve profitability for its formats. Even Tesco (with whom it has a franchise agreement) has been unveiling a range of products in the food and grocery segment and this will soon get extended to general merchandise. A host of items such as clothes hangers, toasters and even iron boards would get included at the Star Bazaar stores. There is also some amount of cross selling of Tesco and Star Bazaar’s private labels in the group’s lifestyle store Westside.

Apart from giving a push to private labels, Star Bazaar would also offer around 20 per cent discount in other categories such as gifting, health and beauty, select consumer durables and kids’ wear during the season targeting a double-digit growth.

With existing 15 stores under it fold, Star Bazaar is launching more stores in places like Pune and Bangalore in the next few months with the possibility of scaled down formats. With FDI in multi-brand retail being allowed, Tesco which already provides back-end support and infrastructure to the retailer is expected to have a more active role in the future.