Pia Heikkila The National , November 13, 2011 It is Saturday afternoon at Mumbai's posh Phoenix Mills mall and the place is buzzing. Giggling girls sit by the central courtyard sipping cold drinks, taking a breather. International labels such as Zara, Mango and French Connection adorn their shopping bags. Very soon a new brand could tempt these marathon shoppers. Kenneth Cole - the US apparel retailer - has entered into a deal with India's Reliance Brands to launch retail and wholesale operations in India. Analysts say Kenneth Cole's market entry comes at an opportune time. "The timing is right for…
Anumeha Chaturvedi Business Today , November 7, 2011 While on a vacation in Delhi in the summer of 2006, New York-based investment banker Neetu Bhatia was dismayed to find that the facility for booking tickets for shows online practically did not exist in India. In the United States, she would book all such tickets through global online ticketing agents like ticketmaster.com. "Soon after I returned to New York, my brother in Delhi called me asking what I thought about setting up an Indian ticketmaster," she says. She was game. Thus, in April 2007, after spending a year on preliminary spadework,…
The operating environment for the fashion retailers in India is only moving towards a more challenging and competitive direction even though the market is yet to mature. The market has grown over the last two decades on account of brand proliferation and developing retail network and more recently due to new product category creations. High consumer awareness and exposure to international trends has cut the product life cycles short. Topping this up, the last 12-18 months has witnessed the growth of the online platform offering an alternate, convenient and cost effective shopping option for consumers. It is necessary that fashion…
Subir Ghosh Asian Correspodent , 27 October 2011 Indian retailers suffered the highest loss of stocks to theft in the world for the fifth year in a row in 2011. Half of this loss was attributed to shoplifting by customers. The silver lining here was that India is the world’s only country where the shrink rate (loss of stocks because of thefts by customer, employees and supplier) came down in 2011, according to the Global Retail Theft Barometer 2011. The shrink rate as a percentage of sales was 2.38 per cent, costing local retailers Rs 3,470 crore, according to the…
Writankar Mukherjee, Atmadip Ray & Pramugdha Mamgain Kolkata/New Delhi, 24 October 2011 Retailers are countering the economic slowdown by offering interest-free equated monthly instalment (EMI) schemes, which they say are not only helping them pull customers into stores but also encouraging shoppers to buy higher value products. Such EMI-based sales promotions have staged a big comeback at a time near double-digit inflation has put a heavy strain on household budgets, making people defer non-urgent and big-ticket purchases even on credit because of hardening interest rates. But transactions carrying zero percent financing have grown more than 50% over the past year,…
Geopolitical friction has again sparked renewed concerns over inflation and rising input costs for FMCG companies as @itmeansjustice @whysnavi write. @devangshu commented.
