Deal to venture into accessories, open EBOs

Apparel manufacturer Deal Clothing Company, known for its brand by the same name, is planning to start housing accessories in their new EBOs. These include perfumes, belts and bags. Sameer Patel, Director, Deal Clothing Company avers, “We are planning to sell accessories

in our EBOs. Belts would be somewhere in the price range of Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 and bags between Rs 800 to Rs 3,000. We want our accessories to be a premium segment.” As far as the EBOs are concerned, Deal will first test market the EBOs in smaller towns. “We are planning to initially launch them in Mumbai, Coimbatore and Rajkot. These stores will be more than 800 sq. ft. and will be company-managed. We should be able to open the stores before Diwali.” Currently, the brand is present in 1,100 MBOs and 85 per cent of their sales come from these. In large format stores they are present in Globus and Pantaloons. This accounts for another 15 per cent of their sales.

Manufacturing a range of clothing from T-shirts to kurtis, denims and non-denims for women and children, the brand has followed the theme ‘urban free flowing’ for its spring/summer ’10 collection. “We have ensured that the texture is soft, comfortable, and light in weight. One would feel extremely at ease and nice after wearing it,” exclaims Patel. Deal Clothing manufactures kids wear under the brand ‘Deal Girls’. This brand did not have a big launch as the company initially wanted to test market their products. Having got a good response, they plan to launch it across the country by the end of August.

Recently, the company has doubled its manufacturing capacity. Today, they make 10 lakh women’s and around three to four lakh kids garments. “Seeing the export market decline, many exporters closed their units. We got hold of them and now we work with these exporters. We have got vendors who help us in production. Other than our in-house units, we have also made our outsourcing stronger because those exporters are equipped with modern technologies and machines,” says Patel.

Their current turnover is over Rs 35 crores. For the next financial year they expect it to go up by 10 per cent.