Tag: retailer

Is Retail Design Tone Deaf?

Devangshu Dutta

October 21, 2011

I can’t think of any other reason why locations such as retail stores, malls, restaurants, large office receptions, and other public spaces are designed and built so badly from the point of view of handling sound.

Fundamentally Unsound

The retail soundscape, if I might call it that, is littered with noisy and uncomfortable spaces. Sound levels in busy restaurants and shopping malls can be as high as 70-110 decibels, which is the equivalent of a busy construction site. Sportswear stores play loud and fast-paced music throughout the day; are they trying to make you believe that you are in a nightclub at 11 a.m.? Internal equipment such as air-conditioning and fans add to noise levels. Restaurants and cafes are worse: noise sources include the kitchen, customers using the crockery and cutlery, chairs moving as people sit or leave, apart from the conversations going on.

For sustained exposure, 80 dB is judged to be the outside limit, and we are frequently exposed to sound levels that are higher than that, for long periods of time.

Unfortunately, it is also a vicious upward spiral of sound. Loudness feed loudness. We all raise our voices when we are competing with the surrounding sounds, and only end up adding to the noise further.

Developers spend millions on picking the right stone, fancy fixtures and creative layouts to make the place “look good”. I don’t remember ever coming across a retail space designer in India who says that the space should “sound good”. Even stores selling high-end audio equipment are badly designed and executed!

I remember sitting in a restaurant belonging to a popular Indian quick service chain after a “modern” redesign. No matter how much I tried, I could not understand a word of what my wife is saying (and that’s not just because we’ve been married for so long!). The reason my wife was inaudible was the high level of ambient noise, echoing from all the hard surfaces around us. What was worse was that I could very clearly hear a stranger who was sitting 5 tables away because the false ceiling had dome that perfectly captured his voice and bounced it across the room to me.

Toning it Down

The most basic thing to remember is this: noise has a negative impact. Not only are the customers uncomfortable, high noise levels actually interfere with the staff’s health and performance. Noise increases physical and mental stress.

What’s more, if conversations are not possible at a normal volume and tone, we have to put in more effort into hearing and understanding what the other person is saying. There comes a point when we just give up. Can you imagine what impact that has on a sale?

Studies have shown that noise can drive sales down by more than 80%. On the positive side, if sound is managed well, sales can rise by more than 1,000%! Isn’t that worth looking into?

A plea to architects and retail managers: do consider the fact that customers coming to the mall expect that space to be qualitatively different from an open market. Making a space noisy is not enough to recreate the feel of an open market – it only means that your space is noisy, and probably worse than an open market will be.

Materials selected for building and fitting out the retail outlet, the mall or the restaurant can have huge implications for how sound is handled in that space. A lot of “modern” design depends on hard, polished, reflective surfaces of stone, glass or metal. The floor, the ceiling and the walls, as well as the fixtures are all surfaces from which sound reflects back into the space, not just once but many times before it dies down. So not only do the sounds get amplified in such a space, the reflections also interfere with each other, adding to the problem.

Not Just the Sounds of Silence

Of course, just making every space a quiet “dead” space is not the answer. Sound and silence affect us positively as well as negatively.

The ancients believed that sound could transform the energy of human beings and their surroundings, and from various base sounds they created “simple” beej mantras to complex Vedic chants. Anyone who has chanted or sung hymns, or even an old peppy film soundtrack knows that sound has the power to affect our moods.

At one extreme, most people are uncomfortable in a heavy engineering factory, or for that matter, a modern shopping centre on a busy weekend, without realising why. At the other end, most people would also be uncomfortable in a recording studio, because it suppresses ambient sound as much as possible, leaving the space “empty”.

In some cases (e.g. a night club, or discount store), sounds need to be louder to ensure that the place “feels” lively, even when it is not full to capacity. In some places our enjoyment is enhanced by noise. Watching a cricket match in a stadium while wearing noise-cancelling headphones would hardly be as much fun. A school playground is “happy” when hundreds of children are running around screaming and shouting at the top of their voices, and “solemn” during a quiet morning assembly.

In some cultures and countries, normal social interaction is “louder” than would be acceptable in others. (For example, a British acquaintance mentioned to me how heavily she felt “the sounds of silence” when she moved back to England, after spending many years in Asia.)

So the key is to first define the ambience and the mood that you want to create in your space. What is the objective: who do you want to attract, who do you want to send away? (For example, operators of public transportation systems have successfully used classical music to drive away loiterers who were undesirable.)

Disney offers an inspiring example of how sound can be used. Over the years they have evolved systems combining sophisticated software and hardware in their amusement parks, such that you can walk through the whole park without the decibel-level changing too much. The music sets the appropriate mood for each specific zone. What’s more, the transitions are smooth as you move between zones.

Not everyone needs the sophistication of a Disney amusement park, but I believe it is worthwhile for most retailers to think about how sound is affecting people in their stores.

I would urge you, at the very least, to look at how it impacts conversations between customers, and between the customer and members of the serving staff, because that will definitely impact sales.

A leading cafe chain proclaims: “A lot can happen over coffee”. Yes, it can; but not if you make conversation impossible.

Try it. Tone it down. You’ll see an upswing in productivity, sales and customer satisfaction.

(Read “How Mr. Q Manufactured Emotion” in the Disney parks, on Dustin Curtis’ blog.)

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Fashioning Seasons

Tarang Gautam Saxena

May 8, 2009

In a recent workshop on fashion styling, we were discussing how the retail seasons have evolved. In the developed economies, from the traditional two seasons – spring-summer and autumn-winter – the number of seasons grew as fashion brands discovered or invented (take your pick!) sub-seasons to create and satisfy distinct demand in specific time periods. For many companies, the number of “seasons” has grown to 10-12 now including transitions and “promo season” series.

India, you would think, essentially has two seasons, the summer and the festive season. However, in the last decade or so, as exposure to the global culture has increased, other “seasons” such as the “Valentine’s Day” have emerged and proved important for retailers.

In fact, events such as the “Sabse Sasta Din” (“the cheapest day”) on the 26th January (India’s Republic Day) created by Kishore Biyani’s Big Bazaar in 2006 should also qualify as seasons, given the huge sales upsurge during the event. In fact, the impact has been such that many other retailers and brands have also taken this concept rather seriously this year. In fact, after a rather dull consumer response in the festive season in 2008, many of our clients reported rocking sales in the last week of January 2009 on the back of heavy promotional campaigns.

More recently while voter awareness campaigns such as “Pappu can’t vote” have been effective marketing initiatives to get many of us out of our comfort zones and exercise our voting rights, many retailers and brands have also seized this opportunity of citizens’ awakening by offering up to 20% discounts to those who have voted. The economic slowdown is certainly getting people to think differently and more creatively. So, “Jago re” (awaken) brands, retailers and countrymen – go ahead and fashion your own season!

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Supermercado in Houston – Wal-Mart in Spanish

Devangshu Dutta

May 2, 2009

Wal-Mart has just opened a new store Supermercado de Walmart in Houston (Texas). The Houston Chronicle reports that the Supermercado aims to reach out to the Hispanic population, tailoring the foods more to Hispanic tastes and needs and adding signs in Spanish. Wal-Mart is also reportedly planning to open a Mas Club this summer, based on its Sam’s Club warehouse outlet, but focussed again on Hispanic customers. (The original article is here: Wal-Mart gives its Supermercado concept a tryout).

Going by some of the negative comments attracted by the article, it is legitimate to ask: what will Wal-Mart’s existing customers think, and how will they behave?

I guess the answer is clearly not black or white (or beige, red, yellow or brown for that matter).

Wal-Mart is segmenting and localizing its offer as a smart information-rich retailer should.

Some customers who hold a tightly parochial view may feel alienated when they read about this development and may stop shopping at Wal-Mart, but most probably won’t bother as long as their local Wal-Mart continues to deliver what they want at prices they like.

Vibrant societies and economies are true melting pots; rather than exclude, filter and ensure conformity, they imbibe and blend newness. The fact is that real assimilation causes both to change – the ones coming in and the society / geography taking them in – and we have to accept that change often brings some pain with it, as expressed by the reader commenting on Houston Chronicle’s website.

The first waves of European settlers created a change when they started landing in North America 500-odd years ago, and so has every wave of immigrants since – Chinese, Japanese, German, Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Korean, Indian, Caribbean and so on. The first settlers will always be suspicious and exclusive in their approach towards the second set, the second lot of the next and so on.

The wave of economic homogenization driven by the post-war baby boom and infrastructure expansion was possibly one of the largest in recent history (other than the Soviet Union and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which were more political than economic). However, we’ve seen the US market grow in diversity in the last 2-3 decades – not only because of differences due to race or country of origin, but also due to geographic, economic and otherwise cultural differences.

Today many of the diverse segments today in the US are large enough to express their unique needs, and expect them to be fulfilled. While the cookie-cutter approach served well during the years of national expansion across homogenized markets, that approach is counter-productive today. A retailer like Wal-Mart can’t be expected to ignore that fact.

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Shopping Centres – Boon or Bane

Devangshu Dutta

March 13, 2008

Many people I know treat shopping centres or malls as a new phenomenon, a progressive development of recent times or a modern blot on the traditional cityscape (depending on your point of view).

However, Grand Bazaar (Istanbul, Turkey) is the earliest known mall, with the original structures built in 1464, with additions and embellishments later.

In India, if one were to include open arcades, Chandni Chowk in Delhi is reported to have opened around 1650, with its speciality shopping streets. (Of course, more traditional bazaars have been around many thousands of years around the world.)

But even if one were to get more “traditional” about the definition of a mall, possibly India’s first mall was founded in the hottest city in the country then, Kolkata (New Market) in 1874.

In more recent history, Delhi’s municipal pride, the air-conditioned underground Palika Bazar was a novelty in the mid-1980s, while Bangalore’s Brigade Road saw several early pioneers with their shopping arcades in the late 1980s.

Then came the mall-mania beginning with Ansal Plaza in Delhi and Crossroads in Mumbai. Everyone started looking at malls as the new goldmine, being pushed ahead by a “retail boom”.

The early stage of any such gold rush usually has several experiments missing their mark, which is what has happened with the hundreds of mall-experiments that have been launched in the last 7-8 years.

Some of the significant and common issues are starting to be addressed, but many others remain.

Catchment-Based Planning is Needed

The top-most issue in my mind is “oversupply”. While this may sound absurd to many people, given the low figures quoted for modern retail, I am referring to the over-concentration of malls in a small geography. If 8-10 malls open 4-5 million sq. ft. of shopping in a catchment that can only support 1 million sq. ft., everyone knows that some of the malls will fail. But everyone also believes that their mall will succeed (otherwise, they would obviously not have invested in the mall).

What happens to the malls that fail? Depending on the design of the building, many of them can be repurposed into office space – another area where a lot of investment is still needed. So in the end, actually, most people win, one way or the other. Yet, there will be some losers. Does anyone “plan” on being one?

The second key issue in my mind has been that mall developers have been thinking as “property developers” rather than retail space managers. The successful shopping centre operators worldwide (now also in India), are actually as concerned about what and who is occupying that space as a retailer would be. They are concerned about the composition of the catchment, the shopping patterns, the volume of sales, the shopping experience. Therefore, the tenant mixes as well as adjacencies are factored into the earliest stages of planning the shopping centres.

In fact, if I were to identify the most critical operational problem for many of the malls, it is the lack of relevance to catchment and, therefore, the low conversion of footfall into sales for the tenants other than the food-courts. Customer flow planning within the mall is another factor that can make a tremendous impact on the success and failure of the tenant stores.

Once you start looking at these factors during the planning of a mall, another obvious aspect that jumps out is “differentiation”. Currently, there is little to choose from between malls (other than possibly the anchor store). However, with more clarity in terms of the target audience, the potential strategies for differentiation also become clearer. The visitors also become segmented accordingly, and there is a natural benefit to the tenants occupying the mall.

If, as a mall operator, you want to be in business for long, and also develop other properties in the future, the success of your tenants is probably the most critical driving factor for your business.

Integration into the Urbanscape

When we gauge malls from the perspective of integrating within the urban landscape, there are obviously some glaring errors being made. Instead of aesthetic design that reflects the heritage and culture of the location and its surroundings, or some other inspirational source for the architect, most malls that have come up are concrete and glass boxes.

Beyond the looks, some of the malls are a victim of their own success. They attract more crowds during the peak than they have planned for. Not only does the parking prove to be inadequate, there is no holding capacity for cars entering or exiting the mall. The result is a traffic nightmare – not just for general public, but even for the visitors to the mall. Someone who has spent 45 minutes stuck in a jam waiting to get into the parking of a mall will certainly not be in the best frame of mind to buy merchandise at the stores occupying the mall.

Some of the problems lie outside the mall-developer’s control – for instance land costs are a major driver of the cost of the project (and, therefore, the lease costs to the tenants), and land is a commodity which is independent. Real estate is available within the cities as brown-field sites (former industrial locations), but the regulations are convoluted and the strings are in the hands of too many different departments of the government (city, state and central). This needs joint creative thinking on the part of developers, the government and the public, if our cities are to develop in a more sane fashion than they have in the past.

Similarly, land deals are still not clean enough for foreign investors to be comfortable participating in many developments. This obviously is holding back a tremendous source of capital and domain expertise that could contribute to the growth of this sector.

Many other operational issues exist – manpower, systems, health & safety – some of them can be managed or controlled by the mall developers, and it is a question of time (and of their gaining experience). Other issues are more in the domain of the government, and need a visionary push to make “urban renewal” a true mission.

New Life for the Cities

In my opinion, one of the most interesting areas which would be in the joint interest of almost all parties (that I can think of) is the possibility of revitalizing the high streets and community markets, and reinventing them as the true centres of shopping.

Many of our markets are rotting (a strong word, but let me say it anyway). The individual stores are owned by individual owners who are not all equally capable of maintaining the same look and feel throughout. The infrastructure in and around the markets are owned or managed by several different agencies. To make matters worse, there is often no cohesiveness and no synergy in the interests of most of the members of the market association. None of these individually have the power or the mandate to recreate the shopping centre. But what if they could get together and take the help of a re-developer?

If an example is needed, New Delhi’s Connaught Place provides the example of one stage of redevelopment. Connaught Place had lost its pre-eminent position as a shopping centre, due to the spread of Delhi’s population and the new local markets that had come up. Further disruption was caused by the construction by Delhi Metro. But DMRC has reconstructed an “improved” centre, and the Metro connectivity has made the customers come back into CP, as it is affectionately known in Delhi.

There are clearly many such opportunities around India’s cities. These need to be looked at as a commercial opportunity for all concerned (revenue for the redeveloper, better sales for the store owners / tenants, more tax revenue for the government from additional sales and consumption). But it is also a broader social opportunity to breathe a new life into our cities, and to make them proud beacons of a growing India.

It would be a mission that would truly prove the worth of shopping centre developers, urban planners, regulators and the retailers themselves.
Any takers?

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 KISHORE BIYANI: The Man They Wrote Off

admin

June 14, 2004

Two years ago, no one took Kishore Biyani seriously. His company, Pantaloon Retail, was seen as a one-man show. Biyani himself was regarded as unpredictable, and not a long-term bet. Today, he is the biggest retailer in India. In two years, Kishore Biyani has bounced back to become India’s largest retailer. Here’s how the maverick ignored conventional wisdom on retailing, and won.

By M. Rajshekhar

The makeover of 26, Residency Road is almost complete. On this Thursday morning, Bangaloreans walking down this tree-lined avenue slow down to stare at the megalith that has replaced the old Victoria hotel. It’s a sharp, new mall. The sort with escalators and huge grey metal flanks clamped to the walls outside.

That seems to be something of a running motif throughout Kishore Biyani’s life. Ask people who India’s largest retailer is, and chances are they will say B.S. Nagesh of Shoppers’ Stop or RPG Retail’s Raghu Pillai. And yet, it is Biyani who is the largest player in the Indian market today. This June, when he announces the 2003-04 results of his company Pantaloon Retail, his topline will be about Rs 650 crore. A clear Rs 100 crore more than RPG’s, the second largest player in the Indian market. Shoppers’ Stop is in third place with revenues of Rs 400 crore.

Back in 2002, when Businessworld last wrote about him, the ‘bania’ from Mumbai was in much the same position as the Congress Party was before the elections. No one took him seriously. Biyani hung around the periphery of the retail industry, which was dominated by personalities like the suave Nagesh, unlike whom, he was taciturn to the point of being tongue-tied. He fidgeted constantly during formal meetings, which made the task of carrying out any serious conversation with him quite an ordeal. Little wonder, he seldom received invitations to speak at industry seminars.

No one quite liked him either, because the man strongly believed – and said so bluntly – that his peers in the retail business were mere copycats. “Most Indian retailers tend to blindly copy from Western models. I am looking for a pan-Indian model of retailing,” he would say to anyone who cared to listen. His search for the ideal model also meant that he took colossal risks – something that scared away most financiers used to dealing with more conventional businessmen. On top of that, Biyani made no bones about the fact that he liked to run a one-man show. “I use people as hands and legs. I prefer to do the thinking around here,” he once famously said. As a result, both professional managers and investors avoided him. And few people gave him any chance of succeeding.

Between then and now, a lot has changed. Biyani has moved centrestage. Today he has three highly successful retail formats: the Big Bazaar hypermarket; Food Bazaar, that straddles the food and grocery business; and his original Pantaloons apparel stores. The property opening in Bangalore is his fourth model, a mall called Central. By the end of next year, he expects to have 30 Food Bazaars, 22 Big Bazaars, 21 Pantaloons and four Centrals. Right now, he has 13 Food Bazaars, 9 Big Bazaars (the 10th is opening next week in Nashik), 13 Pantaloons and one Central. Between them, Biyani’s stores occupy 1.1 million sq. ft of retail space. By the end of next year, they will occupy 3 million sq. ft.

With the opening of Central, Biyani says his portfolio is complete. Even as his competitors like the Rahejas (who own Shoppers’ Stop) embark on new formats (food and grocery), Biyani says that his appetite for experimentation is now sated. “I will no longer try out newer formats. My focus will be to consolidate our operations.” Don’t take him too literally, though. What he means is that he will continue betting on new opportunities ranging from gold to car accessories, but not on quite the same scale as, say, his first Big Bazaar or his first Food Bazaar. Instead, he will concentrate on ramping up each of his four main formats.

Drawn by his growth, in the last two years well-known financial institutional investors like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup Global Markets have picked up stakes in his firm. And when the stockmarkets looked buoyant just a few weeks before the poll results, the Pantaloon stock was among the best performing on the BSE. It quotes at Rs 311 today, up from Rs 51.25 a year ago. Things are going so well now that Biyani has stopped talking about selling out to foreign retailers when they come in.

“Things have really fallen into place in the last two years,” he says. It is noon, and we are walking through the mall. Inside, the whole place is a mess. There are less than 30 hours to go before Bangalore’s newest and largest mall opens for business. And, so far, nothing is in place. The escalators are not working. The shelves are still coming up. The merchandise is still coming in. The stuff which has come in hasn’t been unpacked yet. Cardboard cartons, plastic sheets lie everywhere. And yet, there is something oddly relaxed about Biyani’s demeanour. He wonders about the stockmarket. Why is it rising? Can Manmohan Singh be the next PM?

Perhaps Biyani is in an unusually good humour because he knows that the chaos will settle down soon enough. Just like it has with his entire business. A big factor, he says, was Big Bazaar Mumbai. The format was a huge gamble, says Bala Deshpande, who served as ICICI Venture’s representative on the Pantaloon board. Around 2001, when the first Big Bazaar opened, Pantaloon’s topline was Rs 180 crore. The company needed money to expand, but had just Rs 4 crore of profits. The share price was low (Rs 18), so it could not have raised much from the bourses. Biyani would also have had to part with a lot of equity – his family and he hold 40% in Pantaloon today. Biyani took a Rs 120-crore loan that pushed his debt exposure to as high as 1.5. If Big Bazaar hadn’t worked, he would have ended with huge debts and a loss.

But, as it turned out, the store clicked. In week one, the first Big Bazaar store pulled in over a lakh customers, and did a crore in turnover. By the end of the first year, Biyani had opened three more Big Bazaars. Riding on the hypermarket, Pantaloon saw its turnover of Rs 286 crore (2001-02) climb to Rs 445 crore (2002-03). Investors began to take notice. They also became more comfortable with the idea of him being a maverick. Says Biyani: “Investors look for growth. And there are not many growth stories in Indian retail. Most companies are growing very slowly.”

It helped, also, that around the same time, Biyani began to pay a lot more attention to what the investors wanted. Says Deshpande: “As the new investors came in, they told him that he needed to delegate in order to grow.” And so, he went on a hiring spree. Biyani pulled in the head of Globus, Ved Prakash Arya, to handle operations; Jaydeep Shetty from Inox to create new brands; Sanjeev Agrawal to handle marketing; Kush Medhora from Westside to look after new store rollouts; Ambrish Chheda came in to look after Food Bazaar and handle business development; Bina Mirchandani came in to look after the merchandising; V. Muralidharan came in from Lifestyle to head Central…

Persuading the professionals wasn’t easy. Take Kush Medhora. Initially, he didn’t want to join. “I thought the company was unprofessional from the way the first few stores looked. I had also heard that the company was a one-man show.” But during the job interview, Biyani told him he wanted to abdicate everything except strategic planning and the selection of new locations. That helped Medhora make up his mind.

There is probably another reason why Medhora joined. He enjoys the adrenaline rush. His job, opening new stores, keeps him on the road for 220 days in a year.

As the company grows by leaps and bounds, it is discovering all the advantages of scale. In everything, from raising finances to negotiating rates, the economies of scale kick in. To go from its current 1.1 million sq. ft of retail space to 3 million sq. ft by the end of 2005, Biyani estimates he will need an investment of about Rs 250 crore. Of that, Rs 32 crore has been raised through a convertible debenture offer made in November 2003. Another Rs 60 crore is being raised though debt. The current cash flows should take care of debt servicing without much problem. Meanwhile, the rapidly growing profits can be ploughed back to fund the expansion. The company has an EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) of a little over Rs 65 crore. Right now, says C.P. Toshniwal, chief of corporate planning, “Our turnover is around Rs 650 crore. But by next year, the turnover will be Rs 1,300 crore. So, we will have an EBITDA of Rs 130 crore, all of which help fund the expansion.” In contrast, Shoppers’ Stop will throw up Rs 24 crore as EBITDA this year.

Interestingly, even as Biyani gets more cash from his business, at the same time, he is making that cash work harder. In the old days, he says, “I would have paid Rs 7 crore-7.5 crore for a 50,000-sq. ft store and I would have done an annual turnover of Rs 35 crore. Now, I spend about Rs 4 crore for a store of that size, and do a business of Rs 50 crore-60 crore.”

You can attribute that partly to the mall-making frenzy in this country. There is a shortage of anchor tenants in this country – at least ones that can pull customers in, and Biyani is exploiting that. Not only is he able to negotiate lower rentals, he has begun insisting that mall owners also develop the place for him. In the old days, he says, “We would buy the property, do the fittings and so on. Now, I just take a fully-appointed building from them.”
Day two. Kishore Biyani is standing on a scooter. The Businessworld photographer is trying to get some elevation into the photograph. From that unsteady perch, he is talking about why he thinks the best is yet to come for his chain. All his formats, he says, are seeing an interesting evolution.

Take Pantaloons. This is the brand that started Biyani’s transformation into a retailer. Back in 1997, Biyani was manufacturing two brands, John Miller and Bare. Both were struggling. Even though his products were good, and the pricing was competitive, high distribution costs and margins were making the whole business unviable. And so he decided to set up his own stores. That year, the first of these came up in Kolkata. At this stage, the plan was that the company would open another 2-3 such stores, no more. Recalls Kabir Loomba, who worked with Biyani as a chief operating officer (COO) in that period: “When the first store came up, we did not know when the second store would come up.” But the Kolkata store was an eye-opener. Biyani had been hoping it would do about Rs 7 crore in its first year. It did Rs 10 crore. Loomba feels this taught Biyani an important lesson: the Indian market was under-retailed. This was when the aggressive retail expansion started.

Over the years, Pantaloons has been through a few makeovers. And right now, it is getting another one. Biyani is junking the old positioning of ‘India’s family store’ and is planning to target the youth instead. His consumer insight is, like always, a shade radical: “Within a family, people were thinking and dressing and acting very differently. Which is why I believe studying Indian consumers by demographics and psychographics is a waste of time. We should look at communities: techies, metrosexuals, etc.”

Zara has a neat model that lets it launch new lines in less than 21 days. What made it possible is that it had its own factories. Biyani is doing something similar. Faster manufacturing, says Anshuman Singh, who looks after the supply chain, will let the company keep less inventory, which will make it more responsive to market changes while reducing the amount of stocks to be sold at a discount. At the same time, as fresh stocks hit the market faster, sales will rise. By becoming much more responsive, says Biyani, “We can up our margins by 5-6%.” Right now, he has brought the time lag down from 90 to 40 days.

But fashion tastes in India don’t change that fast. So the real question is: what will it take to drive disposability of clothes higher? According to retail consultant Devangshu Dutta, that is price. “Pantaloons will have to really bring prices down, by half or so. But that might create a problem between Pantaloons and Big Bazaar, for the latter is also based on apparel.”

And then, there is the format that fascinates and worries Biyani: Food Bazaar. Right now, of the company’s topline of about Rs 650 crore, Rs 250 crore has come from Pantaloons, the apparel store, another Rs 230 crore from Big Bazaar and the rest (Rs 160 crore-170 crore) is contributed by Food Bazaar. Biyani worries that Food Bazaar is growing too fast. He says: “I could double the stores I have and still face no problem. But it is important to recognise that it should not be more than 30% of my topline.” (That is why, he says, “I have underplayed food in Big Bazaar.”)

That flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Most retailers believe food is central to their retailing operations. If you look at the rival hypermarket format Giant from the RPG stable, 50% of its revenues come from food. In contrast, Biyani doesn’t want the share of foods to rise over 30%. He has a simple explanation: in India, cost of modern retailing is very high, and food doesn’t offer adequate margins. If cost of operations is 30%, food margins are just 12-14%. In contrast, apparel and non-food segments offer margins of 25-30%.

Part of his success is the ability to paint on a blank canvas. Incredibly, when Big Bazaar was conceptualised, he put in place a team of four people, including himself, none of whom understood the hypermarket business. And one of the first insights the team had was that all neighbourhood markets are the same – each of them has a bania, a dry cleaner and a chemist. “We knew we would have to create that same mix of the mandi in whatever new format we evolve.”

Or take Food Bazaar. “I am going to change the face of food retailing in India,” promises Biyani. Right now, he is working on a new focus for Food Bazaar. He calls it ‘farm to plate’ – essentially, a plank to improve freshness in the products. Boasts Chheda, the chief of business development: “The Ahmedabad Food Bazaar has a full-scale dairy set-up in place with a capacity to produce 1,000 litres a day. We make our own paneer and pasteurise milk. The company is also adding spice grinders and atta chakkis (flour mills).”

It’s an example of how earthy entrepreneurs think differently. Says Biyani: “It is obvious to everyone that what Indians prize most in their food is freshness. That is what I need to give my consumers. But most managers take that as a mandate to set up a cold chain in this country. But I wonder, why cannot I have a farm next to my store? Managers always complicate things. It is the MBA culture. B-schools teach you how to manage complexity, but I don’t think that is necessary. Life is quite simple.”

Central is a smart concept too. It is a seamless mall. In other words, while there are lots of retailers under one roof, the look and feel is like that of a department store, down to the unified billing centre. And yet, all the stocks are held not by Biyani, but by the partners. By the end of September, Biyani will add two more – a 210,000-sq. ft monster in Hyderabad, and a smaller one in Pune. A fourth one will come up by May next year. The four Centrals will do about Rs 360 crore in turnover in the first year.

To continue innovation, Biyani has a new businesses team. Newly constituted under the charge of former Globus manager, Anand Jadhav, it is trying to identify new businesses for the company. Says Jadhav: “In 4-5 years, same store growth might start to plateau. To keep that rate of growth intact, we are identifying new businesses we can expand into, or use to replace less profitable ones.” Right now, Jadhav and Biyani come up with the ideas and Jadhav’s team sees how each of the areas can generate a topline of Rs 100 crore in two years. So far, he has zeroed in on footwear, music and car accessories. His mandate: to launch 3-4 business ideas every year.

Talking about managing innovation brings us to contrast Biyani and Nagesh. Nagesh believes Biyani will have to give up on gut-feel soon. “Gut-feel is not consistent. He will just confuse his managers terribly. There is no doubt in my mind that Kishore will have to go in for tech-driven answers.”

In many ways, the two are poles apart. Nagesh is extremely systematic. He gets systems in place and then scales up very fast. Biyani works the other way around. He believes in growth first, and that problems can be fixed along the way. As the Indian market evolves, it will be interesting to see who has the better retailing organisation. The scientific Shoppers’ Stop, or the serendipitous Pantaloon. It will also be interesting to see how Pantaloon retains its founder’s intuitive spirit even as the professional managers and systems take root.

It is a little after 6 p.m. The diya is lit. The ribbon is cut. And the mall opens for business. A lot of employees are hanging around, all eager to see how the mall does. Medhora is standing, grinning, near the entrance. “Five days before the store opened,” he tells me, “A tenant called to say he could not get any cabinets for his counter. We had to run to find carpenters. We got the cabinets just in the nick of time.”

The mall begins to fill up. The first glitches reveal themselves. The public address system is not working too well – the speakers are too high. And then, a few minutes after the mall opens, the power fails. The lights dim. The escalators stop moving. Opening glitches, shrugs Biyani.