Indian Terrain Fashions’ plans to launch a ‘Made in America’ jeans brand using denim from a US mill made into jeans in Guatemala, is a move that bucks trends for brands sold in India. The move is an interesting twist in the growth story of a 10-year-old brand that was, until recently, a business division of the Chennai-based apparel manufacturer Celebrity Fashions. Celebrity’s notable customers include Gap, Nautica, Armani Jeans, Timberland, Dockers and Ann Taylor.

About five years ago, Celebrity had invested in growing its capacity by acquiring another exporter’s manufacturing facilities. However, Celebrity’s manufacturing and export business has been under pressure due to the difficult environment in its main markets, and last year Indian Terrain was demerged from its parent.

It now seems Indian Terrain is striking out on an independent path, with plans to launch a ‘Made in America’ jeans brand. Managing director Venkatesh Rajgopal says the company proposes to source the denim from an American mill and have the jeans manufactured Denimatrix in Guatemala, which also produces for brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch. According to him, Indian Terrain will use the same raw material as Abercrombie & Fitch, and “will be able to track every pair of jeans to the same cotton fields in Texas.”

The company’s competitors, both domestic and international brands operating in India, mainly buy denim products from within the country.

Denim is currently a very small part of Indian Terrain’s casualwear product mix which is largely sourced from its parent, Celebrity Fashions. The company is looking at launching the “mid-premium” priced brand in September that will not be “just about quality, but about offering a lifestyle.” Rajgopal estimates that denim has the potential to grow to 30-35% of the company’s business in three years.

The demerger of Indian Terrain from its parent company was carried out in 2010 with a view to achieving better valuation for the branded business and to provide additional liquidity to its founders and private equity investors. The company is currently present at about 80 exclusive brand stores and through 400 multi-brand retail stores, in eight cities, as well as in Singapore’s Mustafa Mall. It closed the financial year ending 31 March 2011 with sales of INR1.21bn (US$27m), and expects to grow its top line by 25% this year.

Its retail customers wait to see whether Indian Terrain will be able to effectively integrate denim into its core brand philosophy and grow to a third of the product range. However, for investors the critical question is this: after the demerger from the manufacturing parent and with product being imported from the Americas, will the brand business be able to maintain gross margins at the current levels of about 40% to 45%? Only time will tell.

The apparel retail sector worldwide thrives on change, on account of fashion as well as season.

In India, for most of the country, weather changes are less extreme, so seasonal change is not a major driver of changeover of wardrobe. Also, more modest incomes reduce the customer’s willingness to buy new clothes frequently.

We believe pricing remains a critical challenge and a barrier to growth. About 5 years ago, Third Eyesight had evaluated the pricing of various brands in the context of the average incomes of their stated target customer group. For a like-to-like comparison with average pricing in Europe, we came to the conclusion that branded merchandise in India should be priced 30-50% lower than it was currently. And this is true not just of international brands that are present in India, but Indian-based companies as well. (In fact, most international brands end up targeting a customer segment in India that is more premium than they would in their home markets.)

Of course, with growing incomes and increasing exposure to fashion trends promoted through various media, larger numbers of Indian consumers are opting to buy more, and more frequently as well. But one only has to look at the share of marked-down product, promotions and end-of-season sales to know that the Indian consumer, by and large, believes that the in-season product is overpriced.

Brands that overestimate the growth possibilities add to the problem by over-ordering – these unjustified expectations are littered across the stores at the end of each season, with big red “Sale” and “Discounted” signs. When it comes to a game of nerves, the Indian consumer has a far stronger ability to hold on to her wallet, than a brand’s ability to hold on to the price line. Most consumers are quite prepared to wait a few extra weeks, rather than buying the product as soon as it hits the shelf.

Part of the problem, at the brands’ end, could be some inflexible costs. The three big productivity issues, in my mind, are: real estate, people and advertising.

Indian retail real estate is definitely among the most expensive in the world, when viewed in the context of sales that can be expected per square foot. Similarly, sales per employee rupee could also be vastly better than they are currently. And lastly, many Indian apparel brands could possibly do better to reallocate at least part of their advertising budget to developing better product and training their sales staff; no amount of loud celebrity endorsement can compensate for disinterested automatons showing bad products at the store.

Technology can certainly be leveraged better at every step of the operation, from design through supply chain, from planogram and merchandise planning to post-sale analytics.

Also, some of the more “modern” operations are, unfortunately, modelled on business processes and merchandise calendars that are more suited to the western retail environment of the 1980s than on best-practice as needed in the Indian retail environment of 2011! The “organised” apparel brands are weighed down by too many reviews, too many batch processes, too little merchant entrepreneurship. There is far too much time and resource wasted at each stage. Decisions are deliberately bottle-necked, under the label of “organisation” and “process-orientation”. The excitement is taken out of fashion; products become “normalised”, safe, boring which the consumer doesn’t really want! Shipments get delayed, missing the peaks of the season. And added cost ends in a price which the customer doesn’t want to pay.

The Indian apparel industry certainly needs a transformation.

Whether this will happen through a rapid shakedown or a more gradual process over the next 10-15 years, whether it will be driven by large international multi-brand retailers when they are allowed to invest directly in the country or by domestic companies, I do believe the industry will see significant shifts in the coming years.

In most conversations we have had with international brands in the last 2-3 years, India consistently appears on list of the top-5 markets in which to expand into.

The second most populous country in the world, India has a young population that offers a vibrant population mix that will provide a workforce and consumers in decades to come. There is steady growth in per capita income and a greater availability of credit, as well as a significant change in the consumers’ outlook to life that has propelled consumption levels.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development ranked India as the second most attractive destination for global foreign direct investments in 2010. The lowest recorded GDP growth rate during the global slowdown was still a decent 6.7 per cent. This growth rate is expected to have returned around 9 per cent in 2011, and is driven by robust performance of the manufacturing sector, as well as government and consumer spending.

The ongoing opening up of the economy over two decades and its robust growth has steadily attracted brands and retailers into the country. Many of them have now been in the country since the early 1990s, and the numbers have grown exponentially during the last 8-10 years. Despite this, the market is far from saturation and many more international brands are actively scouting the market.

Many of them are value brands in their home markets and may, therefore, be more a logical fit into a “developing” market, but there are also plenty of premium and luxury names on the list. For instance while the growth has largely been led by soft goods product brands, as incomes have grown, the presence of more expensive consumer durable brands has also expanded.

While the journey to the Indian market has not been a smooth ride even for the well established and successful international brands in the market, brands that have invested in understanding the psyche of the Indian consumer, adopted flexibility in market approach and displayed persistence, have been paid off handsomely.

Some international brands have exceeded domestic brands in size and reach, while others have had to reconcile to being niche operators. Some have seen profits while others may have their senior management wondering what fit of madness brought them to tackle this market where they can only dream about making money sometime in the future.

Typically, when looking at a new market the very first question anyone would ask is: what is the market potential for brand?

However, you should also be prepared to ask yourself: what need is the brand addressing and what is the value being offered by the brand? How would it be able to effectively and efficiently deliver that value? In many cases, for those entering a non-existent product category a more basic question is: “Is there a need for my product offer?” Just because a brand is huge somewhere else in the world does not automatically make it desirable to the Indian consumer.

While most brands want to target the Indian middle-class millions, their sourcing structure and strategy places them out of the reach of most of the population. Brands that have succeeded in creating a significant presence, maintaining their brand image and having a sustainable operating model have, almost uniformly had a significant amount of local manufacturing. Notable examples from fashion include Bata, Benetton, Levi Strauss, Reebok, among others. In case of certain food brands such as Domino’s and McDonald’s, the companies have collaborated with and developed their vendors locally to bring down costs, and improve serviceability.

Apart from the costs and margins, another important issue is that of the adaptability of the product mix. Brands that are sourcing locally and have a significant product development capability in India are also able to respond to specific needs of the Indian market better, rather than being driven by what is appropriate for European or North American markets. This is an enormous advantage when you are trying to be “locally relevant” to the consumer in an increasingly cluttered marketplace.

Indeed the question is more to do with the brand’s willingness and capability to create a product mix that is most suitable for India through a blend of international and India-specific merchandise. The famous “Aloo-tikki” burger by McDonald’s is a great example of a product specifically developed for the Indian consumers. Not just that, India is probably McDonald’s only market in which its signature dish, the Big Mac, is not sold.

Of course, flexibility in tweaking the product to suit Indian market can become a concern when it amounts to losing control over the brand direction, and mutating away from the core proposition that defines the parent in the international market. Many brands wish to control every aspect of product development head office, but this also severely limits their ability to respond to local market needs and changes. A one-size fits all strategy obviously will limit the number of consumers that the brand can effectively address in a market such as India.

Another key question is: what is the degree of control that a brand wants to exercise on the brand, the product, the supply chain and the retail experience of the consumer? The corporate structure itself may be determined by the internal capabilities and strategies of the international brand in their home market or other overseas markets. A brand that has presence through a wholesale business in the home market may not have internal capability or experience in retail, and would look for an Indian partner who can fill in the gap.

Based on whether they want direct operational control over store operations, international companies can set up fully owned subsidiaries or joint ventures to manage the business in India. Many brands prefer to take a slow and steady approach as they do want to exert a significant amount of control over the business (including companies such as Inditex, the owner of Zara, and other retailers such as Wal-Mart and Tesco), entering only when they are fairly confident of being able to closely manage the business in India right up to the retail store.

During our work we have come across both extremes – companies that want to manage the minute details of the India business out of their own head offices, as well as companies that are so hands-off that they only want to hear from their franchisee or licensee when things are especially good or particularly bad. While a balanced, middle-of-the-road approach would be the logical one in each case, in reality individual styles of the top management have a huge influence on the approach actually taken. Also, the size of the potential market segment – relevant to the brand – has an important role to play in the strategy. If the brand is meaningful only to a small segment of the population, or priced at the top-most end of the market, one company may choose to establish an exploratory distribution relationship, while another might choose to set up an owned presence rather than look for an Indian partner to handle their small business.

While perfect partnerships seldom exist, companies could be a lot more careful we have found them to be, in questioning the criteria and motivations for choosing partners. In some cases, financial strengths, or past industrial glory were qualifying factors for picking franchisees, and the relationships have failed because the business culture was divergent from the Principal’s. In other cases, partners have been picked because they “have real estate strengths”, but no consideration has been paid to whether the partner has the operational skills to manage a fashion brand.

On several occasions, franchise relationships and joint ventures have split because one or both partners find that their expectations are not being fulfilled, or the water looks deeper than it did when they got into the business.

The opportunities in India are many. As the managing director of one international brand commented in a conversation with Third Eyesight, India is a market where a brand can enter and live out an entire lifetime of growth.

However, international brands do need to carefully identify what role they wish to play in the market, and what capability and capacity they need operationally to create the success that can truly root a brand into the rich Indian soil.

Suneera Tandon

Businessworld, May 20, 2011

The buzz at Dabur is Real this summer. It has just roped in Zlata Creative Design, a brand consultancy from Down Under, and spent close to Rs 18 crore to give a booster shot to its two fruit-juice brands — Real and Real Active. Krishna Kumar Chutani, vice-president for marketing at Dabur, says fatigue was the trigger: “Consumers have been looking at the same juice packs for over 10 years now.” It has also added Real Fibre for that nutritious zing.

Now, there’s nothing to beat nimboo-paani (lemon juice) when it comes to matters of thirst. But Real’s market share is juicier than its rivals. Elara Capital puts it at 52 per cent. Right behind Dabur is PepsiCo’s Tropicana at 35 per cent. The remaining is shared by others such as Coca-Cola’s newly launched Minute Maid juice, Parle’s Saint Juices and some local brands that are still warming up. (This market share is for the juices/nectar category only — beverages with 25-85 per cent pulp concentrate.)

On The Shelf
Sure, the thirsty swig more cola. It packs more than a fruit-punch in the annual Rs 10,500-crore beverages mart. The fruit-based beverages market is much smaller at about Rs 2,000 crore. Fruit juice sales come in at a shade over a third of this at Rs 750 crore. But fruit beverage is seen as the next big squeeze. It is growing at a healthy clip of 25 per cent year-on-year as against carbonated beverages that is growing at 22 per cent per annum.

The bet is on the growing pool of the health-conscious that believes fruit drinks are the real big chill. Godrej’s Nature Basket, which caters to the higher end of the market through its 13 retail outlets, has witnessed a 4:1 sales ratio between fruit and aerated drinks. It also vends high-end imported juice brands from the US and South Africa such as Ceres, Pfanner and Florida, priced anywhere between Rs 125 and Rs 250 for a litre as against Real and Tropicana, which fall in the range of Rs 85-Rs 90. “Consumers are more than willing to pay for these brands. Juices have constantly outdone other drinks. It is an obvious market preference where our health-conscious consumers opt for juices,” says Mohit Khattar, managing director at Godrej’s Nature Basket.

Homi Batiwalla, director-juice and juice drinks at PepsiCo, would like some of that business come his way. “Fruit drinks are the next big thing and we are constantly investing in better technology to get the best out of this market.” PepsiCo might have held back from repricing Tropicana this year, but it has tweaked the way it hawks its mango drink Slice, which will now be sold — the only one at that — at three price points. You still get to gulp down from the 200 ml tetra-pack; there’s also a bigger-gulp 350-ml Slice priced at Rs 22. PepsiCo has also upped the price of its 500 ml bottle by Rs 3 to Rs 28.

For Spar, a chain of 14 hyper-markets run by Max Hypermarket India, a consumer tilt towards fruit beverages is the trend. “The sale of fruit juices and fruit-based drinks market is twice that of carbonated drinks. The demand for fruit drinks category has been growing steadily at say around 10-12 per cent annually,” says Viney Singh, managing director of Max Hypermarket India that also sells mango juice under a private label. “We also house a few regional brands such as Cocojal, a range of flavoured coconut drinks, and Sip On, local mango and apple drink that is sold only in Mangalore.”

It also helps that a sipper is born every minute. For most consumers, the lines are fuzzy. Juice, fruit nectar or fruit beverage, it is the pulp that matters. If what you drink contains a generous 85 per cent or more fruit pulp, it can be called juice. It is fruit nectar if there’s 25 per cent to 85 per cent pulp; and it is just a fruit-based drink if the pulp is at 25 per cent. To most consumers, it does not seem to matter though — as many just want to have a ‘healthier’ or more ‘natural’ option than carbonated, synthetic drinks. “The concentration of pulp does drive up the price. You get the sense that it is a more wholesome product. But I think the perceived benefits of having a ‘natural product’ remain attached to products all along the price curve,” says Devangshu Dutta, CEO, Third Eyesight.

Mother Dairy, too, wants to get a few more sweet drops out of its Safal brand. It will now come in 200 ml plastic bottles with a new look. Pradipta Sahoo, head of horticulture business at Mother Dairy Fruits & Vegetables, says the company will look at how consumers reach out to the shelves. “We will tailor our range to future market trends.” Safal’s range is distributed and sold through 1,000 exclusive outlets in the Delhi National Capital Region and Bangalore.

Then you have Unilever’s Kissan. It has farmed out Kissan Soya Juices in three new flavours — apple, mango and orange. Safal makes it clear that it is not juice; its nectar. You will be forgiven though if you mistake Pepsico’s Slice to be pure mango juice!

Points out Dutta: “Package graphics or point-of-sale collateral does not make the distinctions any clearer for consumers.”

If it is true, it is a great way to juice your way to the bank.

(This article originally appeared in Businessworld.)

We didn’t get an award, but got the chance to give one away — the Coca Cola Golden Spoon Award 2011 for the “Most Admired Foodservice Retailer of the Year: Cafés & Juice Bars” to Costa Coffee (Devyani International). Congratulations also to the other nominees: Café Coffee Day, Jus Booster Juice, Mad Over Donuts, Baker Street, and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

Eric Oving (Larive), Virag Joshi (Devyani International), Devangshu Dutta (Third Eyesight)

PHOTO CREDIT: IMAGES MULTIMEDIA