Westside in Mysore

The retailing venture of the Tatas, the Trent Limited, has launched its maiden experimental franchisee outlet Westside in Mysore.

Spread across 10,000 square ft over two floors, the store offers a complete and exclusive fashion wardrobe, along with a collection of household and gift items, cosmetics and accessories.

It has come up in Kuvempunagar, one of the major extensions witnessing fast commercial growth in Mysore.

Trent Marketing head Neeti Chopra told Business Standard that Trent has proposed to open another 11 stores this year across the country, both in metros and secondary cities like Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Rajkot. Bangalore will probably add another outlet to the present three.

It will also have a Hyper Bazar, the first in Bangalore, shortly.

"The Mysore outlet is the first franchisee departmental store in the country in association with the Mysore-based Srinivas Enterprises. If this Mysore experiment succeeds, we plan to have more such franchisee stores. We are already sourcing a lot of stuff from Tirupur, a leading knitting centre in South India. We will source more from across India," she said.

Neeti said, "It is important for us to be in Mysore as it is witnessing a big growth in the retail market with IT and ITeS companies setting up shops in this city of palaces.

Besides, Mysore is becoming an extended city of Bangalore, like Pune for Mumbai. As it is, we are having around a thousand loyalty card customers in Mysore, who make purchases in Bangalore outlets."

Making a presentation at a press briefing earlier on the tremendous opportunity for the organised retail growth in the country, Trent Strategy General Manager K V S Seshasai said India has become the most attractive destination for global and domestic retailers.

Established in 1998, Trent pioneered the retail market by setting up its first Westside in Bangalore.

It has become one of India's largest and fastest growing chains of retail stores and has established 26 stores at 18 centres across the country ranging in size from 15,000 "� 30,000 sq. ft. each.

Its Star India was a hyper market with 50,000 sq ft and Land Mark, acquired in 2005, was an outlet for books and music, presently with nine branches at six centres.