OYO cashing in on football mania

It's the season of football and brands are going all out to woo youngsters with clothes and accessories which have football as their main theme. Spykar Lifestyles too is doing just that through their junior wear brand OYO. They are enthralling children with

their soccer collection. Sanjay Vakharia, Director Marketing, OYO explains, “We are working on sports as a theme and its soccer this season. Children’s clothing is not defined in terms of party, formal or casual wear. Everything is casual and associated with leisure. So what differentiates the product is what one does on garmenting, the use of graphics, etc. Every brand has their own way of looking at these things and our team is trained to give better graphics than normally seen in the market.

As

far as styles are concerned, OYO wants to be a contemporary brand. Hence, they ensure that their lines are fresh, colors bright and cheerful and that the graphics spread joy and cheer. “There are no specific trends in kids wear as it’s not as much a trend-driven business as it is comfort-driven. So we do everything that will make the products comfortable. We use only pure cotton and pay special attention to the trims,” explains Vakharia.

In fact, OYO works in tandem with Spykar. Vakharia elaborates, “There are normally a lot of things which get out of Spykar and get into OYO. There are influences on fabrics, prints, sometimes also on garments and silhouettes. This is an added advantage to the OYO customer as he always gets something that is in trend because of the fashion that Spykar gives out.”

Currently, OYO is being distributed through the company’s own store formats. They have 30 shops, which are exclusive standalone OYO stores and are present in 60 stores which are Spykar and OYO combined. A typical OYO store is 300 to 400 sq. ft. in area. All stores are franchisee-based. By spring/summer ’11 the brand plans to go to the MBOs. Their first target would be 300 MBOs and probably 30 units of two large format stores.

Launched last year the company made Rs 23 crores from OYO by the end of that year. This year too they are hopeful of arriving at a similar number because they changed the way they sell the garments. Elaborating on their future plans Vakharia adds, “Next year we will make a drastic change in the selling formats. We will try to get the turnover down to probably Rs 15 to 16 crores, consolidate and implement the things we have learnt. In other words, we are going to de-scale the brand, regroup, put all the learning’s in place and then rework the strategy on how to move further. Our learning includes understanding price points, trends, colors etc.