WESTSIDE STORY: THE CONSUMER IS QUEEN
Sourish Bhattacharyya (HT City)

In India, the customer is no longer the king; she’s the queen. That was the message sent out by plain-speaking Gary Newman, buyer for Westside, the Tata-owned chain of retail stores that’s all set to open an outlet at the Alankar cinema complex, Lajpat Nagar, and has signed on Yuvraj Singh as its brand ambassador for three years.

In an illuminating talk on Upper India, which is how he describes the consuming class of 30 million that keeps brands in business, Newman said “the woman under 35 drives the organised retail market in India.” Organised retail, by the way, accounted for 2 per cent of the Rs 1,340,962 crore that Indian consumers spent in the year 2000-01. And the woman under 35 is changing the way this business is being conducted.

So, who’s this woman who causes Gary Newman’s eyes to light up and his heart to go aflutter, who makes him declare that “if you want to be a part of the retail revolution, drive the business through the under-35 female”? Newman is quick with the answer: “She’s a person of the world who wants to go out and look like her sisters around the world. She’s aware of what’s happening in the world as it is happening. She’s the changing face of India.”

That explains the surging demand for westernwear, driven by the under-35 woman’s desire for the global look, and it cuts across cultural divides. Not surprisingly, 85-90 per cent of the merchandise is common to all Westside stores. “We cannot live with the myth that we are different from the rest of the world,” Newman said. “People in Chennai want to wear exactly the same clothes as people in Delhi.” The common market, in fact, cuts across geographical divide as well, which is why you see garments made in India for the Indian market “trotting around Oxford Street”. Even two years ago, that would’ve been impossible, for “India went to Oxford Street to shop”.

The organised retail business may be minuscule, but that’s precisely what makes it a big opportunity. As Sanjay Shroff, the promoter of Bangalore’s upscale designer wear store, Ffolio, put it: “There’s a huge opportunity out there for all kinds of retailers. They can easily hope for an internal rate of return of 25 per cent and more.”

Parallel to growing opportunities, there’s also been a revolution of rising expectations, which has made consumers extremely demanding. In the business since 1991, Shroff recalls how in those early years, “we took whatever the designers gave on consignment and the customers bought whatever was being offered to them.” Today, the customer drives what a store like Ffolio sells.

The moral of the story for designers? “We cannot continue to be in the business with a take it or leave it attitude because bottomlines are as important as hemlines. We can’t afford to have ego in this business; consumers can,” declared Shroff. To this, Newman added: “Designers must look at the real world. They can’t afford to go on ego trips. They can’t have people seeing their clothes and sucking in their breath in amazement, but not buying.” Sounds familiar? Well, that’s advice being offered for free by speaker after speaker, but except for Bobby Grover, there was no designer around to benefit from it.