Shoppers Stop to expand affordable fashion footprint
Mint. Value retail typically finds favour with India’s middle-income consumers who aspire to wear branded clothes, but do not have a budget to buy established foreign brands. The new format will sell private labels but not follow the Shoppers Stop format under which it also retails third-party brands.
The outlets will also be smaller, focussing on affordable products for women, children and men. It will be 100% private label driven; and hence it plays into our private brand strategy, Nair added. On Tuesday, the company said its profit after tax for the three months ended 30 June fell 41% from the year earlier to ₹13 crore, while sales grew 4% to ₹1,241 crore.
Apparel business saw a moderation and operating environment remains challenging, the company said added. For the near-term, retail will continue to witness rebalancing of price-volume growth equation and a gradual recovery in demand, it added. Demand for apparel retail moderated since Diwali 2022, said Nair.
It is broadly in line with the slowdown seen across other discretionary categories. Inflationary pressures are still persisting, and is being especially felt in the mass market segments, Nair added. “Within the categories that we retail, what we did see was that beauty, non-apparel categories such as luggage, watches, etc.
had good growth; apparel moderated. One thing to bear in mind is that the comparatives are against the first quarter of last year, which is when people were getting back to work and there was a surge in postponed weddings etc. So the consumption of apparel especially had zoomed.
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