Welcome to Third Eyesight’s Blog
January 1, 2006
Thanks for visiting Third Eyesight's blog. We hope you will find information here that will be useful for you in your business or for your studies. Please share the blog links with your friends, co-workers and business associates: you can use the social bookmarking tools, or just copy and paste the URL from the address bar above. Do encourage everyone to explore the Third Eyesight blog. While we share this content freely, please keep in mind that we do like to be acknowledged if someone re-uses our content. So if you quote material from our website, please ensure that you clearly…CONTINUE READING
Retail in Critical Care – The Impact of COVID-2019
April 7, 2020
Oil shocks, financial market crashes, localised wars and even medical emergencies like SARS pale when compared to the speed and the scale of the mayhem created by SARS-CoV-2. In recent decades the world has become far more interconnected through travel and trade, so the viral disease – medical and economic – now spreads faster than ever. Airlines carrying business and leisure-travellers have also quickly carried the virus. Businesses benefitting from lower costs and global scale are today infected deeply due to the concentration of manufacturing and trade. A common defensive action worldwide is the lock-down of cities to slow community…CONTINUE READING
Retail 2020
December 17, 2019
Remember the year 2000? After Y2K passed safely, that year some optimistic analysts predicted that India’s modern retail chains would reach 20 per cent market share by 2015. Two years after that supposed watershed, another firm declared that modern retail will be at around that level in 2020 – but wait! – only in the top 9 cities in the country. Don’t hold your breath: India surprises; constantly. As many have noted, “predictions are tough, especially about the future!” What we can do is reflect on some of this year’s developments that could play out over the coming year. In…CONTINUE READING
Retail Wasn’t Born Yesterday
August 17, 2019
Retail is such a pervasive and dynamic a sector of the economy, that it is impossible to identify a single point at which modernisation began. I’ve met countless people who perhaps entered the retail sector during the last 15 years, and who mark the beginnings of modern retail around then. There is no doubt that there has been an explosion of investment in retail chains in the last 2 decades, but we need to acknowledge the foundation on which this development is built. The current titans of the sector are standing on the shoulders of previous giants who have created…CONTINUE READING
5 Pieces of Advice to Young Professionals Entering the Fashion Industry
May 27, 2019
(The following is the video and the text of the Commencement Speech by Devangshu Dutta, chief executive of Third Eyesight, at the Convocation of the batch graduating in 2019 from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Patna, India.) I would like to just share a few learnings from my own career. I hope some of these learnings will provide you some food for thought, and if they stick, I hope they prove valuable to you in some way in your own career. I think as a graduate of a professional institute, there are 5 life-skills or attributes or pieces of…CONTINUE READING
Retail 2.019: Navigating by Customer Experience
December 20, 2018
Do you have this feeling that 2018 went by a little too quickly? Well, however quick it seemed, it was certainly momentous for retail in India. If 2016 was marked by the shock of demonetization, and 2017 by the pains of GST implementation, 2018 highlighted two threads – the obvious convergence of the online and offline world that had been ignored for far too long, and the interest of foreign capital in India’s consumer world. Walmart bought India’s loss-making ecommerce leader for an eye-popping US$ 20.8 billion valuation, while ecommerce giant Amazon injecting equity into Shoppers Stop, bought Aditya Birla’s…CONTINUE READING
The Oneness of Retail
October 26, 2018
[Accompanying Image credit: Amazon Go; CC/Wikimedia Commons/Brianc333a)] To many, retail seems to be having an identity crisis. Closed storefronts on American and European streets and dead malls in India and China are blamed on the growth of online retail. At the same time, the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon, is opening physical stores and buying offline retail operations in the US and in India, while the world’s largest retailer, Walmart, is busy digesting India’s ecommerce market leader. Even India’s online fashion and lifestyle websites – among them Myntra, Firstcry, Yepme and Faballey – are acquiring offline brands or opening stores.…CONTINUE READING
Wellness: From Lifestyle to an Industry
September 28, 2017
In recent decades, the dependence on established medical disciplines has begun to be challenged. There is the oft-quoted dictum that healthcare sector tends to illness rather than health. Another saying goes that some of the food you eat keeps you in good health, but most of what you eat keeps your doctor in good health. With a gap emerging between wellness-seekers and the healthcare sector, so-called “alternative” options are stepping in. Some of these alternatives actually existed as well-structured and well-documented traditional medical practices for thousands of years before the introduction of more recent Western medical disciplines. This includes India’s…CONTINUE READING
The Brave New (Old) World
September 6, 2017
Over the past few years, the Internet has been revolutionising the way we interact with each other, as individuals, as companies or corporate entities, providing a mass of information keeps growing with no end in sight. With cheap and direct access, we can quite simply move around with a few clicks, most of the time locate what we want, make an informed (and even comparison-based) decision, and exit. Surely, as many pundits forecast, the Internet should bring an end to intermediation of any sort. Well, yes. And no. Yes, the Internet makes information more easily accessible to everyone. Every week…CONTINUE READING
Indian fashion stores look for expansion, US counterparts shut many
February 16, 2017
Raghavendra Kamath, Business Standard Mumbai, 16 February 2017 Indian fashion chains are betting big on the consumption story here as American chains shut stores, amid competition from online retailers. Macy’s, the largest department store chain in the US, said it was closing 68 stores. Sears will also close 42 stores. Kmart is closing 108 stores and and discount chain Kohl’s has closed 18 stores, according to reports. Indian chains are scripting a different story, despite a strong online retail presence. Future Group-owned Central plans to add 15 new Central HD stores. Central HD has upgraded their décor and has minimalistic…CONTINUE READING
Marquee labels including Gap, Zara to come with smaller price tags
February 14, 2017
Rasul Bailay & Shambhavi Anand, The Economic Times New Delhi, 14 February 2017 Global marquee fashion and lifestyle brands such as Gap, Zara and The Body Shop are resorting to price cuts to stay competitive and increase their market share in the price-sensitive Indian market. UK’s cosmetic brand The Body Shop slashed prices across categories in India by 20-30% on Friday while US fashion brand Gap is looking to bring down prices of certain products by 10-15% by allowing its India franchisee Arvind Lifestyle Brands to manufacture them locally. Arvind will produce 30-40% Gap merchandise in India to be sold…CONTINUE READING
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