Madame: Dressing up the uber cool women in style

Women’s wear brand Madame which caters to the young working women eyeing a perfect blend of comfort and aesthetics is working hard to woo its target group. While the brand's in-house R&D team stays abreast with the latest in fashion and forward looking trends, its retail strategists

have been elevating Madame's presence in key urban markets. One of these strategies is e-retailing. Bipan Jain, CMD, Jain Amar Clothing makers of the brand Madame says, “We are an online retailer. Not many Indian companies are in this space. When it comes to apparel, e-commerce is tough because the Indian customer wants to feel everything he’s buying. But we are better off. We do about six pieces a day and have had just two returns because of size.” The brand handles the e-commerce within the company and it’s not outsourced. Madame has not joined hands with Yahoo or any other provider because if they get into that they have to think of the return on investment, which is not big for online shopping at this point in time.

Currently, they are present in 500 MBOs across India and have 62 of their own retail stores. The average size of their EBOs is 1,100 sq. ft. “We have a strong concentration of EBOs in north India in states like Punjab, Delhi-NCR, Madhya Pradesh and UP. We are present in all major cities of the west like Baroda, Ahmedabad. Down south we opened in Hyderabad last year, and are now in Bangalore too. We also have one store in the northeast as well. Nearly 40 per cent of our stores are franchises and 60 per cent are company-owned.  We aim to hit 100 stores by the end of this fiscal,” Jain informs.

Concentrating more on the south is one of their major agenda as of now. They also want to open six stores in Mumbai and expand to Kolkata and the northeast. Among the larger formats, they are currently present in Lifestyle. However, they find large formats’ terms and conditions unacceptable. “Lifestyle gives us a good space per store; on an average 300 sq. ft. Hence, we are with every Lifestyle store,” adds Jain.

Madame’s manufacturing plant is based in Ludhiana and they have close to 3 lakh sq. ft. of manufacturing space. “We have nearly 500 employees with an in-house development team. These are young kids from institutes like NIFT, NIT. The R&D team is spearheaded by our chairman,” exclaims Jain.  Jain further says that they would reach Rs 75 crores this fiscal and have been growing steadily at 25 per cent per annum.