Spykar’s Next Move: A Mid-priced Brand and Innerwear for Youth

Spykar Lifestyles, the makers of popular denim and casual brand Spykar is planning a new brand in the mid-price segment. Their flagship brand Spykar is positioned as a youth brand in denims, but now Spykar Lifestyles plans to tap the mid-price segment where it sees an opportunity.

Director Marketing, Sanjay Vakharia says it will not be a sub category of Spykar rather they will come up with a different name for it. “We are looking at pricing it between Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,200 and aiming to launch it within a year” he says. The mid-price segment is difficult to reach out and a brand needs to be fairly large to attempt it. India does not have many brands in this space while the international ones coming into India have their own ideologies. Most often, they don’t want to change their ideology for India. And by default their products end up being premium. So there aren’t many mid-priced or low-end brands from abroad, and Spykar wants to fill that space.

Meanwhile, Spykar is open to a tie-up with some international brand for its range of clothing. “We have the expertise to handle both brands and merchandising. We know the Indian market well and have an established distribution network. We want to leverage these strengths and tie-up with an international brand. It may not necessarily be a denim or casual brand,” says Vakharia.

As of now Spykar is into denim wear and casual wear. Their product line includes jeans, T-shirts, shirts, accessories and cargos. The brand is now launching innerwear for the youth. “It’s a sub-brand called ‘Under Jeans’ by Spykar. We will start with 20 styles,” Vakharia says. In the beginning, it will be sold only through their exclusive stores. “In the first year we will do two-and-a-half to three lakh innerwear pieces. We are expecting business worth Rs 4 crores from this,” he says.

Spykar has given its undergarment licensing to a Mumbai-based company called Just Sales. Meanwhile, the brand has hit it big with its eyewear and deos in the accessories space. They are also launching fragrances soon. These will be sold through Spykar stores.

At the moment Spykar has 1,200 retail points. This includes 275 exclusive brand outlets, 140 large formats and the rest are MBOs. Nearly 60 per cent of their business comes from EBOs and 20 per cent from large formats. The EBOs sized around 600 to 800 sq. ft. are run through the franchisees. The brand is planning to add 40 new EBOs next year and another 35 the following year. The aim is to push up Spykar’s retail points to 1,300.

Like most other brands, Spykar’s focus will be on Tier II cities. “Since we haven’t done much in the south that region will be our main focus. In Coimbatore and Cochin we have one store each, so we are going to expand there. We would like to go to Calicut and Ernakulam in Kerala. Apart from that whichever states we are in, we would like to get into Tier II and Tier III towns,” Vahkaria sums up.