After becoming the country’s largest apparel retailer, Reliance Retail is now scaling up distribution of clothing and fashion products to third-party stores, creating an exclusive portfolio of branded products for this business-to-business venture.
The company has already launched more than 50 such exclusive brands and the number will be increased by 2-3 times shortly as part of its latest strategy to expand the fashion business, going beyond its own stores as that offers much higher growth opportunities, two senior industry executives in the know of the development said.
The brands it has launched so far include Silkfeet and Jivers in footwear, Xlerate in footwear and athleisure, Feet Up in women’s footwear, Dhuni by Avaasa in Indian wear, Riva in womenswear, John Player Select in menswear, Kidlyboo in kidswear and Altair in t-shirts.
These brands will be distributed by Reliance Retail across all markets, including rural, to be sold through third-party stores that are part of its apparel distribution network. The company is running a pilot under the Ajio Business banner, which will be scaled up by next spring-summer, one of the executives said.
“Reliance will launch its own apparel and fashion brands across categories such as western wear, Indian wear, inner wear, lingerie, costume jewellery, footwear, fashion accessories in the value and mid-premium range to be sold through lakhs of third-party retailers. Organising the unorganised will be the next thrust area,” the executive said.
The other executive said the B2B business in apparel will become a bigger revenue generator than Reliance Retail’s own apparel retail stores in five years. He said 80% of the apparel retail market is unorganised in India which is a bigger opportunity to cater than just grow through own stores.
“The textile industry is a large employment generator and Reliance would want to nurture it by ensuring small apparel retailers can offer an assortment. Reliance will create a backend for them so that they can also do sales by showing catalogues,” he said.
An email sent to Reliance Retail seeking comment remained unanswered at press time Tuesday.
Reliance is also distributing other popular apparel and fashion brands through Ajio Business. These include Campus, Khadim’s, Liberty, Biba, Globaldesi, Lotto and Adidas.
Reliance Retail is the country’s largest apparel retailer with over 4,000 stores across multiple brands. Its Trends brand is the largest fashion retail chain with over 2,600 stores. It has recently launched new formats like Azorte which is into high street fashion, youth-centric fashion at Yousta and Centro departmental stores.
“The company will expand the newer formats by 50% annually for next few years, while Trends stores will be expanded by 10-15%. While the overall apparel market is growing at 11%, organised retail is growing at 18-20%,” the second executive said.
Reliance, the country’s largest retailer, is also the leader in consumer electronics and mobile phone retailing, and grocery.
