Lemax targets women’s wear by next fiscal

Men’s denim and casual wear brand Lemax, launched in 1995, is now keen on foraying into women’s wear by the end of spring/summer ’11. The women’s wear collection will not be high fashion jeans and will be under the same brand name.

“We will start women’s wear after a season in, April, May ’11. Initially, we will have two fits that is, any two best fits selling in the market at that point of time. We feel, the slim and skinnies will do better. The women’s denim range will be priced between Rs 699 to Rs 1,199. Initially, it will be launched in 10 stores and after three months, if it does well in these 10 stores and we understand the psyche of women customers, we will go pan-India,” says Brijesh Shah, Director, Winstar, makers of Lemax brand.

Meanwhile, in the men’s wear category, Lemax will be coming up with its autumn/winter collection. Shah says for the forthcoming season they have worked a lot on the fabrics and styling. Targeted at the young just out of school boys and young office executives the collection named ‘Break Free’ has a lot of torn jeans in it range. “It signifies I have come out of the routine. Now that’s the way I am going to wear it,” says Shah.

He says in the near future they are looking at width in terms of all categories. And fast fashion is the way forward for them. “A customer should find new merchandise in our store every week. We will update 60 per cent of the range every week. We are looking at a fast fashion range like Zara. We won’t start with accessories as they are limited to youth who go to college however, we are doing belts. It will come as a package with the jeans.”

In terms of retail presence, Lemax is sold pan-India through a strong distribution channel and a direct-to-store channel for large format stores. “For the MBOs we follow the distributor format. We have 12 distributors and we supply to 600 MBOs. In April 2010 we opened a 600 sq. ft. EBO in Bangalore. It’s company-owned and company-managed,” avers Shah. Going forward they have plans to open five EBOs in the next one year. These EBOs of 600 sq. ft. each will be located in Hyderabad, Chennai, Ernakulam and Pune. All of them will be company owned and managed. The brand is also present in large formats like Central, Reliance, Brand Factory, Shoppers Stop and Lifestyle. “The way Reliance Trends and Central are expanding, we are not able to match quantities in terms of what they want for a particular store. They have 70 stores lined up to open with us, out of this I will only look at 20 stores this fiscal,” adds Shah.