Shoppers Stop tapping growth through Tier II cities

Shoppers Stop the popular retail chain is aiming to increase its pan India presence. Currently, they have 33 stores across the country and the plan is to add another seven stores by the end of this financial year. “We will open a store in Aurangabad in

October and the second store in Chennai will open by next January-February.  New stores will open doors in Indore, Pune, Mysore, Vijayawada and Delhi by March 2011. The average area we are looking for is 50,000 to 55,000 sq. ft,” says Govind Shrikhande, Customer Care Associate and Managing Director, Shoppers Stop.

While talking about their retail expansion plans Shrikhande avers “People in Tier II cities have the same aspirations as that of Tier I cities as they always look to bigger cities for fashion trends. We take the complete fashion concept to them for convenient shopping. Whether it is Amritsar, Aurangabad or Bhopal we already had customers from these cities visiting our key stores in Delhi or Mumbai. Now that new malls have come up in these cities, we are reaching the customers there.” Shoppers Stop offers an unparalleled assortment of apparel brands for men, women, and children from leading international and national brands. It also retails personal accessories, fragrances, beauty and cosmetics, footwear, home furnishing and décor. The aim is to provide customers a truly international and luxuriant shopping destination.

Shoppers Stop has a huge range of denims and casual wear apparels. Shrikhande adds, “The ratio between denims and casuals in our stores is almost 50:50. Denims are dominated by jeans whereas casual wear has more of shirts, tees and trousers.” In Q1, Shoppers Stop had a strong like-to-like growth in sales of 21 per cent. Denim grew by 30 per cent, while the casual segment grew by 40 per cent.

Besides retailing external brands, Shoppers Stop also retails a host of exclusive (in-house) brands like Life that offer a fashionable range of clothing for the youth in the age-group 18 to 28  years. Under Life, Shoppers Stop also offers a trendy range of shirts, T-shirts, bottom wear, casual dresses for women. Besides this, Life also offers a vast selection of denim bottoms for both men and women.  By 2012, the brand is expected to grow by 30 to 35 per cent. “Traditionally, Life’s shirt range were doing the best, but this season we have also seen a significant  growth in the sales of jeans by Life,” Shrikhande informs. Shoppers Stop also retails   super premium denim brands CK and French Connection, this has positively increased their average price points. “I don’t classify them as pure denim wear. They also have a lot of casual wear and they satisfy a specific target segment in a few stores,” he sums up.