Women's innerwear launched, Van Heusen is plannning 500 exclusive stores

Following the launch of women’s innerwear and athleisurewear range in the the mid-premium segment, Van Heusen, a brand owned by Aditya Birla Fashion and Lifestyle, is focusing on coming up with exclusive brand outlets for men’s and women’s innerwear range. 

The company, which is looking at a franchisee model, currently has 15 such stores across Chennai, Bengaluru, Mysore, Vijaywada, Dehradun and others, of which five are company-owned. 

“We plan to take up this exclusive outlet count to 35-40 by this year and in the next 3-4 years, to 400-500. This expansion will be primarily led by a franchise model,” Puneet Kumar Malik, CEO, Innerwear Business – Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd told Business Standard.
 

Such exclusive stores, which currently have a collection of men’s innerwear, loungewear and athletic wear range, are likely to come up soon in Delhi, Kolkata and other cities. 

“These stores can also house the women’s innerwear range as well. We are currently appointing distributors for the major focus cities for the women’s lingerie and loungewear range,” he said. 

While Van Heusen’s range of men’s innerwear is sold across 9,000 outlets, the women’s range is likely to be on sale across 2,000-3,000 outlets by the end of this fiscal year. 

In the first phase, the distributors will be appointed for Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore by the end of October and by December end, the women’s innerwear range will be extended to Mumbai and Pune, among other cities. The target is to reach 15 cities in the current year. 

In the next 3-4 years, Malik has targeted to reach a total of 30,000 outlets for the innerwear category, of which, around 24,000 outlets will stock the lingerie and women’s lounge and athletic wear range. 

A large section of this expansion will be led by the wholesale channel. While in case of apparel, the wholesale channel accounts for 30-35 per cent of the total sales, in case of innerwear, it is 70 per cent of total sales. 

Malik said that the women’s innerwear market in India stands at Rs 160 billion currently, of which the major portion is in the unorganised segment. 

“This presents a huge growth potential in this segment. The current market growth is around 22 per cent”, he said. 

This Aditya Birla Company is sourcing the range from manufacturers in Sri Lanka and India and plans to soon open a third sourcing channel from Indonesia.