Odyssey, a wholly-owned leisure retail arm of the Hyderabad-based media group Deccan Chronicle Holdings Ltd, will soon launch vending machines to dispense book and music albums. The company is currently piloting the project at the Wipro campus in Chennai. Among the cities it is targeting are Bangalore.
“The machines will vend 10-15 new and bestselling book titles and musical chartbusters. We are at present in the process of getting the format rights and understanding how it works. We will roll out the concept at railway stations, bus stops, apartments and wherever the crowds come in the next three to four months,” Ashwin T S, managing director of Odyssey, told Business Standard.
Announcing the launch of Hyderabad’s largest leisure store spread across 38,500 sft, which makes Odyssey the largest player in the segment with a retail space of 250,000 sft, Ashwin said the company would add 40 to 50 new locations to the existing 37 stores by March 2009.
“Of these, around eight will be high street format stores, each spanning 15,000-20,000 sft. We are on the verge of signing up a property in Bangalore. The remaining outlets will be opened under our ‘Express’ format to cater to the needs of customers in suburbs,” he said, adding the typical investment in each store will be Rs 3,000 per sft. Ashwin said the company had also designed a ‘Metro station’ format. The company already has an Odyssey store at the departure lounge in the Hyderabad international airport. It will soon be present at the Bangalore airport.
“We will be bidding for setting up shop at various stations of the Hyderabad Metro rail as well,” Ashwin said. Odyssey currently has nine stores each in Chennai and Bangalore, five in Hyderabad, two each in Mumbai and the National Capital Region, three in Pune and one each in Coimbatore, Nagpur, Kolkata, Kozhikode, Salem, Trichy and Varanasi.