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| Indiabulls renames retail arm; rebrands lifestyle stores |
| Raghavendra Kamath / Mumbai Oct 07, 2009, 00:46 IST |
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Indiabulls Retail, part of the Indiabulls group, has rebranded its loss-making lifestyle stores, Indiabulls Megastore, as Store One -- the second time it is being renamed -- in a bid to garner more sales and footfalls.
Indiabulls has also renamed the company as Store One Retail India Ltd from Indiabulls Retail Services Ltd, in a bid to align the corporate identity with the branding of the stores, the company official said.
The company has hired a clutch of fashion designers such as Manoviraj Khosla, Ritu Kumar, Monisha Bajaj and others for the rebranding exercise, to design the feel of the store, layouts and logos and so on.
Store One has already launched the rebranded store in Nagpur last weekend and is planning to launch one more store this weekend in Pune. It is also planning to launch its Mumbai store next year and one in Delhi a couple of months after launching the Mumbai store, the official said.
The rebranded stores will have more value-for-money products and have more shop-in-shops concepts.
"We want to give a very strong lifestyle feel to it and sell merchandise of fast fashion in Store One stores. We will aggressively resposition itself as aspirational product,'' said Store One India Retail chief executive Anil Lepps.
In January 2008, Indiabulls renamed Pyramyd Megastore as Indiabulls Megastore and convenience stores Trumart as Indiabulls Mart as part of its rebranding exercise. The company also rebranded Megastore to Happystore earlier this year, in a major branding exercise.
The company then shut the operations of Megastore in the past couple of months as part of the rebranding exercise. "It was part of a well-defined plan to rebrand our stores,'' Lepps said. "We have shut down stores wherever it was unviable because of high rentals.''
The company has also shifted its Corporate office to NCR from Mumbai.
Apart from those shut for the rebranding exercise, Indiabulls has shut four Megastores in the past year. Currently, it has a Happy store each in Pune and Faridabad and plans to open one more Happy store in Pune soon.
Indiabulls entered retailing in late 2007 with the acquisition of Piramyd Retail from the Ashok Piramal Group for Rs 208 crore. It acquired 42 stores from the acquisition, which included 33 smaller stores and nine bigger lifestyle stores.
Indiabulls Retail made a net loss of Rs 90 crore in FY 2009 and a net loss of Rs 18.3 crore in the June quarter of FY 2010. The company made losses of Rs 128 crore in FY 2008.
Economic downturn coupled with job cuts forced shoppers to curb spending and undertrade. Due to high rentals and falling footfalls many retailers such as Reliance Retail and Aditya Birla, among others, have closed or shifted stores.
Lepps said the company will see a turnaround in one and a half years. "You need a certain scale to make business profitable. We want each and every store to be profitable,'' Lepps said.
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