Aditya Birla Group’s apparel brand will host India’s first fashion week for men next week, wants to shift to lifestyle products from stiff formals
Why so serious’ could well be the question that Van Heusen, one of Aditya Birla Nuvo's premium apparel brands, is asking its potential consumers. In its bid to distance itself from staid corporate work-wear and establish itself as a lifestyle fashion brand, Van Heusen is lining up jeans, women's evening wear and a super-luxury shirt range.
First up is the Van Heusen India Men's Week to be held in Delhi between September 11 and 13, which will see leading designers such as Rohit Bal, Ashish Soni, Raghavendra Rathore and Rajesh Pratap Singh participate.
Why a fashion week for Men exclusively? Van Heusen’s Chief Operating Officer Shital Kumar Mehta says “fashion weeks in India have been apologies for men's fashion, where 90 per cent of the lines are women's. This, despite 80 per cent of the apparel market comprising menswear.”
The exclusive men's fashion week would be the fourth such event in the world, the other three being held in Milan, New York and Paris. For Van Heusen, this would mean a long-term association that would underline its positioning: The apparel brand does not want to mean stiff formals any more but rather a “brand breathing life into boardrooms with a dash of fashion”, Mehta says.
It would also lead to a symbiosis where the designers would roll out collections for Van Heusen's and VDot's (its clubwear brand) Spring/Summer collection of 2010, infusing more panache into the brands, while showcasing their talent across the 500 stores (out of which 60 are exclusive Van Heusen outlets) throughout India.
Mehta says, “We want to go beyond products and wardrobe and be seen as a lifestyle brand. In our stores, almost 40-45 per cent of merchandise is now non-formal wear, while one-third is part of our fashion collections.” According to Mehta, Vdot has already logged sales worth Rs 50 crore in two years, since its launch. To add to the list are VDot jeans that will be launched next summer and an evening wear line under Van Heusen Woman. Van Heusen, Mehta claims, has clocked “30 per cent growth year on year for the last five years.” VDot accounts for 20 per cent and Van Heusen Woman 10 per cent of the Rs 350-crore brand.
The company is working to translate the brand's positioning into tangible benefits for its consumers. The work wear for women is not the usual boxy suits but boast of fitted dresses as well, while men’s shirts flaunt a slimmer fit for a more tailored look. The collections on offer get refreshed every three months to retain an off-the-ramp feel for its classic shirts that is at the same time not over the top. For the incorrigibly formal, Van Heusen has its range of white shirts that the brand claims is the whitest in town. Shirts in its ‘convertible’ range let wearers slap on the same shirt different detachable cuffs and collars.
The brand is banking on below-the-line activities and non-mass media. One-third of Van Heusen's branding spends go into unconventional communication (the brand plans to spend close to Rs 20 crore on communications this year). Sprucing up the look and feel in its exclusive stores, the brand will have its clothes hung and not stacked, to make its range more amenable to browsing.
Store walls, attractively painted, would also double as display platforms. To tie in smaller dealers and shops, the company makes sure that it packs orders clustered according to the collections so that the individual shopkeepers can have a concerted display of shirts, trousers and other clothing and visual merchandising from the same collection. It is gearing up to get into store-in-store formats as well, having already turned a few into mini-showrooms for the brand with more pronounced displays and merchandising.
Store branding with smaller shopkeepers would also help it keep smaller towns interested in the brand, even as it is poised to launch its Heritage line of shirts that will be priced Rs 4,000 upwards (with premium pricing and packaging). For, while the slowdown saw its growth sink in the second half of 2008-09, its distribution in lower-tier towns kept growth at 15 per cent, even as the metros saw a decline in sales. Keeping a firm eye on new markets, the company has budgeted for 18 stores this year, while it had opened shop at 50 outlets, including towns such as Trissur. Eighty per cent of the brands products retail in a range of Rs 1,200-2,000.
Its customer relationship activities are also keeping it abreast of what its consumers want. Rather than just the trite system of rewards, consumers in its loyalty club can also get invited to coffee mornings on weekends at its different stores, putting them in touch with the marketing team at Van Heusen. A conversation with such a customer, who praised its tapered Italian fit, drew the company’s attention to focus on how a garment’s fit can be an important differentiator while its teams had been wracking their brains on colour and other add-ons which required added investment.
To underline its fashionable side, it had launched a Ghajni collection late last year for which Aamir Khan had walked the ramp. The tieup saw a 20 per cent increase in walk-ins in its stores in December. An investment of Rs 1 crore in the Ghajni branding raked in sales worth Rs 6 crore, according to Mehta.
