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BRANDS The Rise Of Apparel's Also-Rans Riding on the ready-to-wear wave, a gaggle of mom-n-pop apparel brands is going national and giving the biggies a run for their money. By Shailesh Dobhal
As an up-and-coming garment manufacturer and supplier, Ashwinder Singh was faced with a typical dilemma while trying to get his foot in the door at the capital's premium apparel retailer, Big Jo's. ''The choice was between supplying (every month) 8,100 pieces of Big Jo's T-shirts or just 91 of my own, then nondescript, brand USI,'' Singh recalls. A decade on, the director of New Delhi-based Uni-Style Image is glad that he stuck out for USI, which with revenues of Rs 17 crore last year is one the fastest growing premium knitwear brand in the country, ahead of international brands such as Benetton and Lacoste.
Singh epitomises a quiet revolution that has been playing out in the apparel market over the past few years. Almost out of nowhere, dozens of small and medium enterprise (SME) brands have burst upon the national scene, giving the bigger players a severe run for their money. Consider: Almost two-thirds of the Rs 9,000-crore branded ready-to-wear (RTW) market is dominated by SME brands such as Singh's. Out of the 125 key apparel brands in the country, with sales in excess of Rs 1 crore (projected for 2001-2002), as many as 75 are from the stable of owner-driven SMEs. So, just who are these SMEs, and how do they manage to get their product, brand, and retail strategy right? ''The big brands created an aspiration, but these second-rung brands are filling the gap of product availability by flooding the retail,'' explains Harminder Sahni, Associate Director, KSA-Technopak. Indeed, while it was Madura Garments' Rs 85-crore Allen Solly brand that popularised Friday Dressing among corporate executives, it is brands such as TNG (launched in 1999, brand sales Rs 48 crore), Koutons (1999, Rs 35 crore), and Easies (1998, Rs 20 crore) that are cashing in on the ready-to-wear boom.
Their success hasn't come easy, though. Most of the tier-two companies, which typically were exporters of private labels, have spent considerable time, energy and money on product quality, reading the market trend, and then advertising to build their brands. Impressively enough, some of them seem to have an acute sense of the market dynamics. Says Nikhil Mohan, Director of Gurgaon-based Mohan Clothing Company: ''Our business is becoming something like the foods business. If you want to eat Chinese food, you go to a speciality restaurant, not a general one.'' Mohan's brand, Blackberrys, for instance, is positioned as a fashion label, and last year raked in Rs 45 crore in sales. Such smart 'detailing' in business strategy and operations is paying off. While the bigger and established brands like Louis Philippe and Arrow are clocking annual growth rates between 10 and 40 per cent, the upstarts are speeding ahead at 70 to 100 per cent. And that's happening not just in knitwear and casuals but across the RTW categories. Provogue (remember the Fardeen Khan ads?), the two-year-old brand from Mumbai-based Acme Clothing, has already totted up sales of Rs 50 crore. Freelook, from Polki Garments, shed its kidswear image, and was reborn in 1997 as a lifestyle men's brand. Its annual sales at last count stood at Rs 36 crore. Virtually the only national kidswear brand is the Rs 27-crore Gini & Jony from the eponymous Mumbai-based company. Admits Ismail Nagaria, Product Manager, Zodiac: ''These brands identify growing segments and work very hard on innovating their product offering.''
From Label To A Brand When ColorPlus, a brand out of Chennai from S.M. Garments, hit the apparel scene in 1995, it focused its advertising solely on the product attributes. As its success today proves, that's the best strategy for any RTW company. The reasons are simple. Since most of the RTW growth is on account of the customer switching over from ready-to-stitch (RTS) products, the choice of brand is heavily influenced by the product. Things like texture, styling, durability, and colours have all become key purchase influencers. For another, in a market choc-a-bloc with me-too brands, superior products are actually working as brand differentiators. That point hasn't been lost on the SMEs. Arguably, most of the recent success stories are those that latched on to product-led branding. Be it TNG of Dwarka Men's Wear with its stain/bacteria-free fabric, or Kewal Kiran & Company's Easies, with its emphasis on displaying the product range in all its print-only communication. In fact, the emphasis on product is only getting stronger. ''We are readying ourselves for a massive product-led advertising for Koutons,'' reveals D.P.S. Kohli, CEO, Charlie Creations. But product-led brand strategy may work only up to a point. The cut-off will begin once the brand achieves optimal distribution penetration. Thereafter, it will need consumer-pull in order to grow. The problem with that at the moment? ''None of these brands is aspirational,'' points out Sahni of ksa-Technopak. He may just be right. Beyond stating the obvious, what do these brands mean to the consumer anyway? Ask D.D. Agarwal, Managing Director of Dwarka Men's Wear, and he is ambiguous at best: ''(TNG) means the new, now, next generation. And our fabric offer is better than most big brands.'' That could prove to be the Achilles' heel for many of these brands as they look to sustaining their 70 per cent-plus growth rates that they have been used to. Some marketers, however, are taking cognisance and building in intangibles into their brands. Provogue, for instance, is splurging upwards of Rs 7 crore on promoting its brand through young heartthrob and movie star Fardeen Khan. Triad, a year-old Rs 6-crore apparel brand, has just signed on F3 Circuit racer Narayan Karthikeyan to endorse its brand colours. ''Cricket is no longer the cutting-edge game with the young. It is motor sports now,'' says Sandeep Jain, CEO, Deluxe Fabrics, the Jalandhar-based company behind Triad.
Build the product range, but concentrate on the consumer connect in brand building, seems to be the new-found mantra. Indian Terrain, the year-old men's casuals brand from Chennai-based export house, Celebrity Group, is focusing on building brand appeal through consumer-focused communication, not the product, in its print-only national advertising campaign, which will cost it Rs 2 crore. ''The tone, content and matter of our communication focuses primarily on the fact that customer is King,'' says Shankar Balan, Brand Development Manager. While Balan does not disclose brand revenues, he claims that as much as 85 per cent of the sales come from repeat customers. Freelook and Gini & Jony are about to debut their brands on TV advertising, joining the league of big-brand marketers such as Raymond and Madura Garments. In fact, Gini & Jony has not yet done any direct consumer advertising, choosing all this while to spend the Rs 2.7 crore promotional budget on either in-store displays or targeting the trade through trade magazines. 1 | 2 |
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