20th September 2021, Mumbai:

Sales by Reliance Retail’s private labels on the Ajio platform are outpacing other global brands such as Puma, Nike, Levi’s, Superdry, Adidas, etc. These brands include Avaasa Mix N Match, Teamspirit, DNMX and Netplay.

Together, with Puma they formed the five best-selling brands on Ajio this year. The same brands formed the top five at Ajio’s Big Bold Sales in July.

Ethnic private label Avaasa Mix N Match was the top-selling brand on Ajio this year. Other global labels sold in India by Reliance Brands, including Superdry, Armani Exchange, Gas, and Steve Madden, are also among the top-selling brands on Ajio.

Harminder Sahni, Co-founder, Wazir Advisors, says, online players are using the data of other brands to create their own products smartly and position their private brands right next to those established Indian and global brands.

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8th September 2021, Mumbai:

Amazon India has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Industries and Mines Department, Government of Gujarat, to onboard MSMEs from the state on Amazon Global Selling and train them to sell their unique Made in India products to millions of Amazon customers across 200+ countries and territories.

Amazon Global Selling has lowered the entry barrier for motivated Indian MSMEs to expand their business and launch their brands globally, from anywhere in India. The program will grant instant access to homegrown businesses to global markets from Day 1, benefiting from Amazon’s distribution capabilities and global footprint to scale rapidly and build sustainable exports businesses.

Amazon will conduct training, webinars and onboarding workshops for exporters from key MSME clusters like Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat, Bharuch and Rajkot and others. The workshops will focus on sharing expertise and providing training to MSMEs about B2C e-commerce exports and selling to over 300 million people worldwide through Amazon's 17 foreign marketplaces. These courses are designed to provide MSMEs with the knowledge and tools they need to launch their brands and expand their businesses internationally using Amazon Global Selling.

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31th August 2021, Mumbai:

RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group-owned Spencer's Retail reported a 7 per cent growth in its standalone sales during the first quarter ended June 2021.

As per Fashion Network, the company’s revenues also rose marginally to Rs 552 crore during the quarter as against Rs 547 crore in the corresponding quarter last year. Its consolidated net loss narrowed to Rs 24 crore as against a net loss of Rs 55 crore in the year-ago period.

Spencer’s Retail’s total expenses for the quarter declined by 2 percent at Rs 598 crore, as against Rs 609 crore in the year-ago period. Its consolidated bottom line improved by Rs 31 crore, shares Shashwat Goenka, Sector Head, RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group.

The Kolkata-based group also added two new stores during the quarter. It currently operates around 190 multi-format stores in over 42 cities in India.

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18th September 2021, Mumbai:

Avaasa Mix N Match, Teamspirit, DNMX, and Netplay, all Reliance Retail private brands, are four of the top five selling brands on Ajio this year. It exemplifies Reliance Retail's approach of promoting its own private brands through a variety of platforms.

According to a media source, Puma was the only non-domestic brand in the top five. Interestingly, the top five brands during Ajio's Big Bold Sales in July were the same.

Reliance Retail's private labels account for over half of the top 30 brands now offered on Ajio and have frequently outsold prominent national and worldwide brands like Puma, Nike, Levi's, Superdry, Adidas, and US Polo on the country's largest retailer's e-commerce platform.

Ajio is quickly establishing itself as a serious competitor to Myntra in the online fashion market, with a focus on its own private labels as well as Indian and international fashion clothing and lifestyle brands.

“Private brands may be interpreted as the mainstay of Ajio, as it is for nearly other fashion vertical sites,” according to industry knowledgeable sources.

Primarily because the product can be given according to consumer expectations across all components of the marketing mix, particularly in the internet realm where real-time data on customer expectations is available.” This elicited no response from Ajio.

Ajio is quickly establishing itself as a serious competitor to Myntra in the online fashion market, with a focus on its own private labels as well as Indian and international fashion clothing and lifestyle brands. In India, Reliance Brands also sells international brands like Superdry, Armani Exchange, Gas, and Steve Madden, among others.

These are also among Ajio's best-selling brands. Experts think that online merchants have a lot of data on what is selling in terms of patterns, colors, and sizes, among other characteristics, and that online platforms utilize this data to develop their own lines with more competitive prices to entice customers.

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03 September 2021, Mumbai:

V-Mart Retail has started operations of the 74 stores of ‘Unlimited’ in South and West India. Additionally the company has opened four new stores, two in the state of Bihar and one each in the state of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, and has closed one store in the state of Rajasthan in the preceding month.

With this the total number of V-Mart stores now stands at 363 stores as at 2nd September, 2021, including the newly acquired 74 stores and assets of "Unlimited".

Founded in 2002, V-Mart is a complete family retail store chain offering apparel, footwear and accessories for men, women and kids. The company also offers a wide range of home furnishings, general merchandise, toys, tableware, utensils, and other home utility items.

The rich expertise of 17 years in delivering high-quality affordable fashion, coupled with a wide network of 200+ stores across 171 towns in 17 states and the motto of ‘Price"Less" Fashion' has helped V-Mart win the trust of more than 3 crore satisfied customers every year.

In 2018, V-Mart Retail was adjudged the world’s best performing departmental store, as per data compiled by Bloomberg. In 2019, the company was bestowed with the 'Transforming India Through Retail' award for "Transforming lives in Tier II and III cities" by Ministry of Textiles, Govt. of India.

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31th August 2021, Mumbai:

Amazon.com has urged India's market regulator SEBI to withdraw the conditional approval given to Future Group's $3.4 billion retail assets sale to Reliance Industries, citing a court ruling in the US company's favor .

The letter marks the latest twist in the bitter legal spat involving two of the world's richest men, Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon and Mukhesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries.

The eventual outcome is seen reshaping India's pandemic-hit shopping sector and deciding whether Amazon can blunt Reliance's dominance of the country's nearly trillion-dollar retail market.

Amazon has for months been locked in a dispute with Future, accusing India's second-largest retailer of violating some pre-existing contracts by selling its retail assets to market leader Reliance Industries last year.

The Supreme Court this month dealt a blow to Future Retail when it said an interim decision by a Singapore arbitrator in October 2020 was valid and enforceable in India. Amazon had filed the complaint leading to the arbitration ruling, which put Future's deal with Reliance on hold.

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• Donear Industries signs agreement to buy RSWM assets

Watch YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnQ6v9wBHyOlRPSDgJMsJaA

17th September 2021, Mumbai:

Retail giants in India are gearing up to make shopping on digital platforms and physical stores seamless and uniform. They believe, a combination of physical and digital shopping is the future of the retail industry.

Arvind Medirattam, Managing Director and CEO, Metro Cash & Carry India, says, the pandemic has accelerated digitalization of the retail space by three or four years, leading to an emergence of hybrid nature of shopping.

Medirattam was speaking at a session on ‘Innovations changing the retail segment’ organized as part of the 17th India Innovation Summit by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

He said, ‘phygital’ shopping brings better opportunities for an omnichannel player. Omnichannel retail is a multichannel approach to sales providing seamless customer experience for shopping online or in a brick-and mortar store. The need for instant gratification is another trend, Mediratttam added, Consumers now want goods and services to be supplied at the click of a mouse. Hence, retailers have to be agile and efficient to meet this expectation.

Kavitha Rao of IKEA India, adds, the online share of overall business of omnichannel retailers is 12 per cent and 80 per cent of customers start their journey of purchase online. Hence, it is important to make each of these steps seamless – online or offline, she opines.

Timo Salzsieder, CIO/CSO, Metro AG, adds, customers’ experiences have bigger implications for organizations. This needs to be uniform.

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03 September 2021, Mumbai:

Handcrafted shoe brand Pastels and Pop has ventured into offline retail by launching its first exclusive brand store in Bengaluru. Spread across 1,800 sq ft, the store covers three floors in the city’s popular shopping area Indiranagar. It will retail the brand’s latest collection at a starting range of Rs 2,300. The store is expected to encourage the brand to enter new cities in coming months.

Akanksha Chhabra, Co-founder, Pastels and Pop says, the first-ever concept store in Bengaluru will provide a 360-degree shopping experience to customers. It will house a variety of juttis along with the brand’s new slides range. Pastels and Pop is a footwear brand founded by Akansha and Aarti Chhabra and claims to have leading celebrities like Anushka Sharma, Sonam Kapoor, Karishma Kapoor, Sara Ali Khan, Sonakshi Sinha, Malaika Arora, Taapsee, and more are among its clientele.

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30th August 2021, Mumbai:

Future Retail has filed a new case against Amazon, in the Supreme Court to seek clearance for its $3.4 billion retail assets sale to Reliance Industries, which the US firm has challenged.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court held an interim decision by a Singapore arbitrator in October 2020 that put Future Group’s deal with Reliance Industries on hold, as being valid in India.

The top court had also said Future could not appeal a lower court's decision against it. The retailer is now asking the top court to hear the challenge.

In its over 6,000-page filing, Future has argued that if the deal with Reliance doesn't go through, it would cause "unimaginable" damage to the group, including possible job losses for 35,575 employees, and put at risk roughly Rs 280 billion ($3.81 billion) in bank loans and debentures.

Amazon has for months been locked in a dispute with Future, and accuses the Indian firm of violating contracts when it sold its retail assets to market leader Reliance last year.

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13th September 2021, Mumbai:

Flipkart estimates, it will grow by 50-60 per cent this year. The e-commerce company hopes to benefit from the increasing adoption of online commerce. Last calendar year, Flipkart clocked in a gross merchandize value (GMV) of around $15 billion.

Currently it is on an annualized GMV run rate of $23 billion. Flipkart’s GMV run-rate for this year indicates more than 50 per cent growth year on year for company even as the sector remains in a policy flux.

Of the current annualized GMV, around $20 billion is estimated to be from Flipkart while the rest is from its fashion focused platform Myntra. A report by wealth management firm Bernstein says, excluding Myntra, Flipkart clocked in GMV of around $12.5 billion in calendar 2020 while Myntra clocked $2 billion.

The same report said its rival Amazon India clocked in a GMV of around $11.5 billion during the year. According to Arpit Mathur, Partner, Kearney, the gap between Flipkart and Amazon India would continue to narrow on a standalone level but Myntra’s acquisition would help the former’s GMV base.

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01 September 2021, Mumbai:

India’s e-commerce segment advertisement expenditure (adex) is likely to increase in domestic platforms such as Ajio and Tata CLiQ Luxury, etc. As Ajio, along with other Reliance Retail’s platforms and Tata Group’s online commerce platforms gain more traction in the Indian market, the homegrown companies may spend in equal proportion as well.

As per a Best in Media report, this will also give double-digit boost to the overall adex of the country, which reduced to Rs 56,000 crore in the last calendar year.

E-tailer Snapdeal plans to launch tactical ad campaigns during the upcoming festive months, says Soumyadip Chatterjee, Director, Brand Marketing. The company has planned a tactical campaign around the festive season that would reintroduce Snapdeal 2.0 at a brand level. Tata CLiQ Luxury too has been seeing steady growth trajectory on the platform since last year, with growing user base month after month. Mohua Dasgupta, Head, Brand Marketing reveals, the luxury e-commerce platform will continue to be digital-first in all its marketing efforts this festive season.

Similarly, the overall ad spend of Bewakoof is likely to be in the range of 10-15 per cent of its net revenue. The e-commerce platform is planning to accelerate its growth trajectory by investing in marketing, branding, technology and talent acquisition. According to industry estimates, leading sellers on these e-commerce platforms have started to place large orders with the manufacturers for the largest-selling categories of smartphones, televisions, laptops and home appliances in the upcoming festive season.

Gupta says, with a slowdown in international travel and lockdown restrictions, consumers have turned to the internet for their luxury purchases. Companies are also gearing up to ramp up the hiring of temporary and gig workers, she adds. A research by the Indian Staffing Federation (ISF) shows, e-commerce sector will employ over three lakh flexi-staff and gig workers this year, which includes an addition of 60,000 to 70,000 workers during the festive season in the current year.

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Watch YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnQ6v9wBHyOlRPSDgJMsJaA

29th August 2021, Mumbai:

Value fashion and lifestyle products retailer V-Mart Retail plans to open around 55 stores in the current financial year. The retailer currently has around 274 stores across India with a strong presence in Tier II, III cities.

In Q2FY21 ended June 2021, V-Mart Retail reported a net loss of Rs 29 crore ($4 million) as against a net loss of Rs 34 crore it reported in the year-ago period.

As per Fashion Network, the company’s revenue for the quarter jumped two-folds to Rs 177 crore, as against Rs 78 crore it reported in the corresponding period of the previous fiscal year. Its total expenses increased by 77 percent at Rs 220 crore, as against Rs 125 crore it reported last year.

Lalit Agarwal, Chairman and Managing Director, says, the quick pick-up in consumer demand is a testimony to the customers trust in the V-Mart brand, as well as the deep-rooted relationships at local level communities. With a larger number of people getting vaccinated overall, consumer sentiment is already leading back to normal. Business is expected to bounce back stronger in the coming months and the company expects a strong festive season.

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