Christian Fabre Textiles, one of the first BPOs in the garment industry, is seeking to expand its retail presence across south India. The aim is to come up with two flagship stores, each of minimum 1,500 sq. ft. area, in Chennai and Bangalore within
the next few months. Currently, their focus is on the four southern states, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. “Right now we are comfortable with Bangalore and Chennai. Once we master the logistics of the four southern states, we will move into Maharashtra and north India. That may take about three to four years,” explains Christian Fabre, Director, Christian Fabre.
Originally, a buying house the brand has been present for nearly 22 years. When they started off, the brand strategy was to have small shops in many places. It was to take the brand to the customers rather than the other way around. Right now the strategy is to have shops of 800 to 1,200 sq. ft. area. The company already has two such shops, one each in Chennai and Bangalore. Fabre states, “We are not thinking of large formats for the time being. At one time we used to sell through 72 points of sales and didn’t have EBOs. We used to deal with distributors and about 15 to 16 per cent of our products went to them. Another 30 to 35 per cent used to go to retailers. So in spite of doing such a beautiful product with so much of hard work, we used to end up getting four to five per cent from the product. That’s when we thought of concentrating on EBOs. Once we have a comfortable cushion there, we can think of MBOs.” With a small production unit at Chennai they have only seven shops to cater to. The shirts and denims are done in-house while the T-shirts are outsourced to Tirupur.
The brand is also into e-retailing and sees online media as a huge market with a tremendous potential. With a presence in Twitter and Facebook, they seek to make their pages more efficient and vibrant. They also plan to change their website every three months. “If you leave it unchanged, people stop visiting it. We do e-retailing through our website and do not have channel partners now but outsource it to other people. In the long run we will look at some advertising agency or e-retailing agency,” avers Fabre.
Inspired by the concept of fast fashion, the brand has 20 style collections every 15 days. That would be 10 T-shirts, six shirts and four denims. Every 15 days they do some 10,000 pieces. In a year, they expect to do some 30,000 to 50,000 pieces every 15 days.
