Dilip Kapur, President, Hidesign talks to Sohini Sen about rising input costs, brand awareness and expansion. Excerpts:
What are your expansion plans? Are you looking at any specific asset class?
We are about 60 stores now and in another year-and-a-half we should be over 100. We already have around 23-24 stores signed up. We are opening about 2-3 stores each month. We have had an average growth rate of 20-30 per cent in India in the last one year. We are present in both stand-alone and departmental stores. Wherever, Shopper’s Stop or Lifestyle goes, we go with them. As an exclusive store, we look at clean good sales. Also, what works for us is the cosmopolitan customer. Places like Cochin and Coimbatore — where the IT industry has already made a lot of middle class people travel abroad — are easy cities for us. In fact, where people are rich but haven't travelled abroad is a problem for us as the business there is quite localized, corporate culture is not so strong and awareness of international fashion trends is much lesser.
With input costs rising, how do you plan to handle the situation?
Inflation is a major issue. It is getting harder for us. Even though the customer accepts the change of price, just the process when you are across say 200 stores —and not all of them are your own stores — the changeover is very complicated. We try to keep our costs under control, but then prices of everything else is rising.
Do you use social media as a marketing tool? Has it been fruitful?
Recently we did a survey to find out where do people see us. As a result, Facebook came at number 2. Now Facebook is very important to us. We have interactive fans there. and we expect to hit 25,000 within two-three months.