Indian Retailer

The Timberland Company, a leading outdoor footwear and apparel company, on Monday announced an exclusive partnership with Reliance Brands Ltd, a part of Reliance Industries, to distribute Timberland footwear and apparel in the Indian market.

Through the collaboration, Timberland products will be available through Timberland retail stores and premium department stores in major cities throughout India, a press release issued here stated.

The Timberland brand represents four decades of product engineering and innovation, and a deep commitment to preserving the outdoors for which their products are designed, it said.

“With rapidly-growing fashion and retail sectors, we believe India will become a key market for us. Reliance Brands has a wealth of experience in launching and successfully distributing international brands in India, Timberland President and CEO, Jeff Sw artz, said.

“They have a clear understanding of the Timberland brand and consumer, and are as committed as we are to our ideology and passion for the outdoors,” he added.

Spencer’s Retail, a leading Indian retail company, will soon launch private label processed food products like potato chips, biscuits, pasta and is currently testing standalone stores of fish and meat.

“In fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), we want to quadrapule contribution from private labels in the next 18 months. We enjoy 40% share in the nectar category in juices. We are launching potato chips, biscuits, pasta and so on. We are testing standalone stores of fish and meat,” Mr. Vineet Kapila, President,Spencer's Retail, said.

Mr. Kapila said that the growth primarily depends on how much more space you have added and what is your same-store sales growth. While the latter is going up, the amount of sales has not gone up significantly; we have not added much, as we were addressing challenges before us. But we will add space now. In food and grocery, we are seeing same-store growth ranging from single digits to double digits. But we are struggling in discretionary verticals such as durables. There are challenges on margins, too — we are not getting the kind of margins we would want to have.

“We are focusing more on category margins, category assortments and so on to build top line and margins. We are building partnership, strengthening our private labels portfolio, choosing geographies carefully, building back-end in certain categories to improve our margins,” Mr. Kapila said.

He said, “We neither want be nor do we aspire to be the biggest retail player in the country. We want to be among top three in whichever market we enter in. Based on this criteria, we expand or vacate. We will open larger stores. Currently, we have an equal number of large and small stores. Going forward, it will be more skewed towards large stores, which will be 70-80% of our store count”.

“In the past 12-18 months, we had thought hard on these, such as what cities to enter, size of stores to be opened, cost structures, including rentals, and so on and rectified these. We also built a strong technology platform to link all of this. Till the challenges were understood and corrected, there was no point in going ahead with expansion,” Mr. Kapila added.