For a while now, the metros across India have been flooded with designers – from the big labels and quirky niche ones to wannabes, all fighting for a slice of the urban consumers’ pie. At the well-known part of the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week
autumn/winter 2011 held recently in New Delhi, designer Rakhi Bhutani had an interesting comment about rising purchase power and fashion consciousness of towns that have not traditionally been on a designer’s radar. As Bhutani says, “Who would have thought that Raipur, with a population of barely 700,000, would have the buying power to sustain a 5,000 sq. ft. store where Sabyasachi saris costing Rs 2.5 lakh are regularly bought? A lot of buyers from Raipur would come to my store in Nagpur as it’s a less than four hour drive, and kept asking me to open in their town.” As the owner of Aura, the 12-year-old multi-label designer store in Nagpur with a branch in Raipur that Bhutani opened less than a year ago, the four-day WLIFW was an opportunity to catch trends, liaise with designers and book orders for the coming season.
Clearly, small town India is no longer small in its buying ability or in its appetite for fashion. And they are providing a ready and growing market for many fashion designers, especially upcoming. Small town India is the latest frontier for Indian designers, says Gargi Gupta, another upcoming designer, with garments worth lakhs flying off the shelves. Therefore, the question is raised about fashion weeks, which are primarily, trade fairs. It is a surprise then, that the only time business gets talked about is when foreign buyers come calling. While the opening of a fashion frontier in the smaller towns of India, a trend that’s opening a huge market for Indian designers, gets hardly noticed or reported.
Another instance of small town fashion awakening is as per Pearl Uppal, CEO of fashionandyou.com a leading online fashion retail website which offers brands at discounts. He says as much as 35-40 per cent of his website’s traffic and shopping comes from smaller towns, places far off the fashion radar as Ambala, Bhubaneswar, Jammu, Gangtok and Siliguri.
No wonder then that there has been a rash of store openings in recent years. In Indore, BLU opened in 2007. Owners, Aarti and husband Rajeev, opened another branch in Bhopal a week ago. BLU stocks fashion labels such as Anju Modi, AM:PM, Vivek Narang, Raw Mango and others. Soh-Koh opened in Chandigarh two years ago. It stocks A-listers such as Rohit Bal and Rajesh Pratap Singh as well as upcoming designers like Siddhartha Tytler and Soumitra Mondal. Kimaya, the well-known fashion chain, is opening a 2,500 sq. ft. store in Ludhiana’s premium MBD Neopolis Mall next month, while another slightly larger one will come up in Surat’s fashion high street Ghoddod Road in late May. Chandigarh will follow in June, then Jalandhar, Hyderabad, Pune and Ahmedabad sometime next year, according to a company spokesperson. The good times are surely rolling on for Indian designers and smaller towns are the new found destinations.
