CONSUMER WONDERLAND: Dust and great deals

All he needs is a pair of jeans. but software engineer Anurag Singh, 26, finds himself in a fix now. Let's see, Levi's and Lee Cooper both have a 40 per cent discount on offer. Across the road, the Park Avenue trousers at a 30 per cent off look good too. Hmmm; trousers vs jeans. As he thinks, a Benetton shirt in the shop next door catches his eye. It's marked 50 per cent off. As he walks across to investigate, Singh sees Numero Uno offering Hawaiian shirts at 40 per cent off their price. Faced with a problem of plenty, Singh puts his code-wrapped mind to work: Rs 1,500 is his budget, which means he can get that Levi's (Rs 799), a Benetton T-shirt (Rs 199), a Park Avenue tie (Rs 100), a Numero Uno shirt (Rs 225), and a pair of Reebok shorts for Rs 150. His bill at Rs 1,400 is well within the budget, but he stretches it a bit to throw in those Park Avenue trousers for Rs 400. After all, where can he get deals like these?

Where indeed but Mahipalpur, on the edge of New Delhi. This is no escalatored chrome-and-glass mall. There is no whiff of Givenchy-not in the retail outlets at least. Instead you must dodge the occasional buffalo, inhale the smoke from generators, or the exhausts from the clogged six-lane highway alongside, and struggle to park your car in the unregulated concrete mess where once mustard fields swayed in the wind.

Mahipalpur is the stuff of India's village-meets-city nightmares. But it's also a little stretch of heaving consumer heaven, unparalleled in India for the number and variety of brand-name discount stores. The dust-coated showroom windows entice with posters offering up to 60 per cent off on premium brands. Once you enter the showroom, the once-they-were-rustic sales staff will fling brand names at you with a felicity that their fathers reserved for the latest wheat variety.

This is no escalatored chrome-and-glass mall. Instead, you inhale the exhausts from the clogged six-lane highway and struggle to park your car

''We offer the best names and best prices, and that's an unbeatable value proposition,'' says Deepak Bhatia, 33, owner of Apparelforless, which stocks Dockers, Reebok, Levi's and the best Indian brands, ColorPlus, Parx, Park Avenue, Numero Uno, and Givo. There are both company-owned factory outlets selling minutely flawed seconds and feisty multi-brand outlets like the one owned by Bhatia, formerly a marketing exec at Lee Cooper. Even the ultra-premium Lacoste is here (and it's probably one of the few places where the average Indian shopper can afford it), though the company will rip off the Crocodile logo if you're picking up a tee for Rs 275 (minimum MRP Rs 750 onwards).

''Every fashion brand must have vibrant merchandise in their stores, and every single piece doesn't sell, so in order to have fresh merchandise in the regular stores we have a factory outlet here,'' explains Ajay Raj Kochhar, MD, Sports and Leisure Apparel, which manufactures and sells Lacoste in India.

The Transition of the Jats

But to most of Mahipalpur today, brands are subservient to the free-wheeling ideal of lucre. Except the factory outlets, there is no brand loyalty. Even a Bata, which is usually sold through exclusive stores, must share space with competitors. Yashpal Chauhan-a Bata dealer, and a franchisee of Crocodile and seconds dealer for Dash-explains. ''Keeping just one brand restricts our sales,'' says Chauhan, 28, a sturdy Jat from Rangpuri village, who's togged out in spiffy sneakers, jeans and a tee, quite unlike the elders at home who still love their hookah and are most comfortable in dhotis and turbans.

How did Mahipalpur come to be? Apparelforless owner Bhatia, who set up the first shop here four years ago, explains why he did so: land prices in an area dominated by cargo-company godowns and dairies were low, and visibility was high since the highway (Delhi-Jaipur) leads to the international airport and Delhi's tony Gurgaon suburb. A five-star Radisson hotel helps draw in foreign visitors. Starting with 200 sq ft, Bhatia today has 6,000 sq ft spread across three shops with an annual turnover of Rs 5 crore. Nearly 3,000 customers flock to shops like Apparelforless on weekdays, according to traders. Clearly, the retail recession didn't factor in the Mahipalpur model.

It all began four years ago when attracted by the premium-highway location, Nike and Adidas, later Reebok, opened the first factory stores in Mahipalpur (and nearby Rangpuri village), then a typically rough and rustic Jat community. As the land boom took hold, outsiders like Bhatia came in to start multi-brand outlets, though the local-outsider ratio is still 60:40. In the last two years, Mahipalpur boomed.

Mahipalpur is a little stretch of heaving consumer-heaven, unparalleled in India for the number and variety of brand-name discount stores

The Freedom to Boom

Today, companies find it's a great place to dispose-off flawed, outdated, or surplus inventories. And as the jams of Honda Citys, Hyundai Accents, and Ford Ikons indicate, the Mahipalpur model works wonderfully. It has certainly transformed the life of Anil Sehrawat, 27, as well. A jovial, stocky Jat who was from the ranks of India's semi-urban unemployed graduates for three years, Sehrawat began his entrepreneurial odyssey by landing a surplus dealership for Indus League two years ago. Now, he's done so well that he's busy ''settling'' his uncle's two unemployed sons in adjoining shops. For the record, the family still keeps buffaloes at home, though Sehrawat notched up sales worth Rs 80 lakh last year.

Most stores in Mahipalpur are franchisees of brands-they operate on a 12-15 per cent commission. The rest are company run (13.5-14 per cent commission goes to the franchisee, while the stock belongs to the company). Since companies experiment a lot, designs often bomb. And when they do, the surplus stocks land up at Mahipalpur. The largest selling brands are, not surprisingly, Levi's, Reebok, and Nike. A Nike factory outlet is also the hardest-relatively speaking-to set up, since the company takes a security deposit of between Rs 1 lakh to 3 lakh and has stringent policies about the look of the store, the furniture, even the quality of the sales people. But such uniformity is an oddity of sorts in freewheeling Mahipalpur. Just-grab-the-customer is its simple credo.

''Great quality at great prices,'' exults Siddharth Jain, an executive with Hewitt Associates, who has just bought a sweater, a pair of trousers, and a couple of tees. ''I was initially worried about the quality, but after testing one article, I now buy clothes in bulk from here,'' exclaims Neelam Sinha, an exec who works in Gurgaon-based placement firm Astra Consultancy.

Downsides? Of course, there are some: limited selection, chaotic traffic conditions, and illegal electric connections-officials often cut off power to the entire market in an attempt to crack down on electricity theft. But these are just hiccups, incapable of upsetting Mahipalpur's great smorgasbord of choice.