Kishore Biyani’s daughter works with anthropologists, mythologists and sociologists to deliver on her job brief of identifying key themes that can build consumption
It was only three years ago that she joined the Future Group, but Ashni Biyani says she has got 25 years of experience in retail. Kishore Biyani’s only child is mighty pleased with our puzzled look and hastens to clarify that “KB” (fond reference to her father) made sure that she ate, slept and breathed retail ever since she was born, write Shyamal Majumdar and Raghavendra Kamath.
She has been attending the strategy sessions of the company with her father and cousins from age eight or nine. “Initially, I didn’t understand a word of what was being discussed, but started absorbing things slowly. They have become a part of me ever since,” Ashni says, with visible passion.
We are at Mainland China on the second floor of Sobo Central, earlier known as Crossroads. Mumbai’s first mall at the Haji Ali junction was bought by Pantaloon, a Future Group company, from the Piramals in 2008. The steward obviously knows the landlord’s daughter quite well and ushers us into a quiet corner.
So what exactly is the 25-year-old doing at the Future Group, first as design manager of Future Ideas, the innovation and incubation cell of the group, and now as director? Ashni makes it a point to tell us that she is not involved in any operational role as “that’s not something she wants to do”and is more interested in identifying key themes that can build consumption.
That sounds well-rehearsed and we ask her to demystify it a bit. Ashni says she is very hungry and orders veg dumplings and soup before proceeding to explain what she means.
Since the last year or so, her main job has been to “imagine the future” of the current format of the Big Bazaar stores and give design inputs. And all this is being done keeping the cost aspect in mind as money is finite. “Don’t forget I am a Marwari. Even now, we use yesterday’s left-over vegetables for tomorrow’s parathas. So I watch the cost in whatever I do,” the daughter of the Rs 10,000-crore Future Group founder and CEO says. For a change, that doesn’t sound rehearsed at all.
Ashni says she has an 11-member team which includes mythologists, sociologists and anthropologists — people who have studied the nuances of Indian community behaviour — and uses these insights for designing stores, launching new products and planning marketing initiatives. She says her team has learnt a lot from the publishers of the Kalnirnay almanacs, which capture every single religious or community festivals of every large community. That helps the group develop marketing initiatives around these very local festivals. The idea is to capitalise on the tendency of Indian consumers to reserve big-ticket purchases during auspicious days.
That also gave rise to her idea of Big Bazaar Family Centres, which are large-format stores measuring more than 80,000 square feet and focus a lot on the food and cultural habits of local communities. “Earlier, people used to get together and celebrate in temples, now they do the same at modern-day bazaars, or malls,” Ashni says.
The steward is only too glad to give her a second helping of the piping hot dumplings as we concentrate on the chicken clear soup which tastes quite well.
Ashni gives the example of the Big Bazaar Family Centre near the Sealdah railway station in Kolkata. Since a lot of outstation customers come to the city every day, Big Bazaar has on its rolls baul (folk) singers who travel on local trains singing about the latest offers available at the store.
“If you can understand the different communities in the country, their customs, festivals, belief systems and other nuances that bind them together, a retailer’s job is done. Our recently launched Ektaa brand will do precisely that,” Ashni says. The “25 years of experience in retail” is indeed showing.
The Big Bazaar in Malleswaram is yet another example of this community-based retailing idea that she has brought in under her “mentor” Damodar Mall, who is the head of Future Ideas. The Malleswaram store, for example, has been designed keeping in mind that the store belongs to the community within which it exists. So, the store has 65 varieties of pickles, 45 kinds of papads and about 50 types of rice. There is even a cart selling plantains inside the store, a scene very familiar to Bangaloreans.
And then there are community-connect initiatives like “Anna Santharpane”. It started off in Mysore with organising lunches for people (they need not be customers) to be served by Big Bazaar employees every last Friday of a month — another brainchild of Ashni and her team. The customers are given an option to donate any amount in lieu of the lunch and that donation is given away to local charities. Though not a strictly business initiative, the charity lunches have resulted in a 25 per cent jump in monthly sales and are now being rolled out across all stores in South India.
All this planning explains the 12-hour work schedule that Ashni maintains even after her recent marriage. At Malleswaram, for example, she and her team worked on the community store idea for over six months, visiting neighbourhood families to study their consumption patterns and the smaller nuances of life around the locality. “You have to live life at the ground level if you want to succeed in retail,” Ashni says.
After her marriage, however, she has learnt to take it easy on Sundays, but has not yet given up the habit of visiting some of the stores to get more consumer insight. But she has no complaints as “visiting malls on a Sunday is not so much of a bad thing”. It helps that her husband also comes from a reputed business family and understands her compulsions.
The soup is long over and Ashni orders steamed rice and vegetable curry for the main course, while we settle for chicken fried rice and a mildly spicy prawn dish.
Ashni says she doesn’t really worry about the designation she has and that’s where the Biyani surname helps. She can seamlessly move on to different kinds of roles without anybody minding her intrusion. The other good part is she gets enough mentors who are willing to help out. For example, she says, she had no clue about numbers two years ago. Her mentors have made sure that she can now figure out a balance sheet quite fast, which has helped her “live a quarter-on-quarter life”.
As a student, the textile design graduate, who attended courses at Stanford and Parson’s School of Design, was not exactly in love with books and believes — quite predictably — that informal training is the best way to learn.
However, the bad part of having a Biyani surname is that she often doesn’t know whether a colleague is praising her idea because he/she genuinely likes it or the compliment has been paid just because she is her father’s daughter.
The main course is mostly untouched and Ashni says what gives her maximum comfort while pursuing her own choice is that she has no compulsions of staying on and can walk out any day.
As her colleague comes to remind her about a scheduled store visit with her father, Ashni says she is very proud of the fact that she was the first woman in the family to join the business. “The family was a little taken aback when I actually joined and thought I was having fun,” she says.
Going by the changes she has brought in, “KB” would obviously be happy with his decision to push his daughter into the business.
