With an aim of harnessing the opportunities in the youth fashion accessories segment, Titan Industries Limited, the watch and jewellery arm of Tata Group, has announced launch of exclusive Fastrack stores across the country. Titan wants to position these showrooms as exclusive youth accessories stores with products such as bags, belts, wallets and wristbands.
“Youth as a segment needs to be treated very differently in a focussed manner. We feel there are huge opportunities in the youth segment and for that reason we have introduced exclusive Fastrack stores,” Bhaskar Bhat, MD, Titan Industries said.
With the first Fastrack store coming up in Pune in the next two days, the company plans to open 50 such stores across 25 cities by April 2010. The company said while 2-3 stores will be owned by the company, the rest will be through a franchise model. The investment for each store will be in the range of Rs 35-40 lakh. Each store will have a built-in area of 500 square feet. Initially, stores will be opened in Mysore, Chandigarh, Jeypore and Baroda among others.
“With the accessories market growing at 15-18 per cent year-on-year and branded segment in particular seeing a growth of more than 25 per cent, we saw an opportunity for fastrack to expand its portfolio”, he said.
Launched as a sub-brand of Titan in 1998, Fastrack currently is a Rs 250 crore business with a CAGR of 35 per cent for the last five years. The company said most of these stores will be located in tier-two and three cities where the effect of the meltdown had been low. “The tier two and three consumers did not in majority cases trace incomes to IT sector. Also these consumers were not caught in a ‘fear’ factor of losing jobs nor has the sentiment rubbed on like in bigger cities,” he said.