Only Vimal regains Reliance Industries' attention

The brand's Unformal range of fabrics has been increasingly making noise, getting in step with the changing customer and winning back the parent's interest in a low-margin sector

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Only Vimal (Vimal), Mukesh Ambani-promoted Reliance Industries' (Reliance) textile division has embarked on a journey to regain ground in a space that it had ardently competed in, with Raymond decades back. Its Unformal range is now geared to meet the youth's changing preferences in workwear.

Only Vimal, the rechristened Vimal, has moved to capture the need for office-wear that is not the traditional, dreary grey, blue and black. The trend of semi-formals at work, that of teaming a blazer with denims, without a tie, has not been lost on the brand either.

"We have been studying this market for a long time and there has been a significant change in the way men have started to dress. We realised that people have started to wear formal clothes in a very different way," says Anand Parekh, business head of the textiles division of Reliance.

To answer the need of the young man to remain suited in the boardroom but keep his fashion quotient high, Vimal has underlined how its product line could help. Its Fashion Jacketing fabric feels woolen but is lightweight enough to be worn through the year. The country's largest fabric exporter also has Fashion Cottons for shirts that keeps the cloth wrinkle-free and colour fast, despite the look and feel of cotton fabric.

Vimal had kicked off its latest campaign by Scarecrow Communications in August last year, with a "No Tie Day" in nine cities, setting up flash mobs in malls that also hosted tie-burning parties to unveil yet another range called Fashion and Feel, a blend of polyester and viscose. The digital and print media were used to advertise Vimal's unformal category. Reliance is said to have spent Rs 15-20 crore on the campaign.

Vimal was the first brand from Reliance, founded by Dhirubhai Ambani in 1966 at Naroda in Gujarat. "Vimal did very well in the late 70's and early 80's, when it saw massive expansion as well as iconic advertising using some of the best models. If Vimal does what it did earlier to revive the brand then it has great potential to go ahead and become a great brand like it used to be," says Arvind Singhal, chairman of Technopak Advisors.

Reliance has been trying to bring the brand to the forefront again after years of lull, which saw reports of it being put on the block as the conglomerate moved on to businesses with higher margins than textiles. For Reliance, the textile business forms a very small part of its revenues (less than 3 per cent).

But with fabric brands underlining the perfectly-tailored garment to make the customer stick with fabric-buying (most brands now offer tailoring at their stores, for example), Vimal too is stepping up its marketing.

"We have been trying to revamp the brand in the last seven to eight years," says Parekh. Only Vimal's flagship range, Unformal's contribution to Reliance's textile revenues is 10 to 15 per cent and is expected to increase to 30 to 40 per cent in the coming years. Reliance is looking at 22 per cent growth in textile revenues this year.

Reliance had moved on from Vimal's first agency, Mudra (which also began in Gujarat), which had produced some iconic advertising both for its suitings and its Garden range of sarees, to Grey Worldwide.

Last year, it signed on Scarecrow Communications, co-founded by two advertising veterans. Manish Bhatt, one of the founder-directors at Scarecrow Communications, says that Reliance had come to them with the clear purpose of increasing Only Vimal's brand recall.

Recently, its arch rival since its early days, Raymond, too, had replaced its well-recognised 'Complete Man' tagline to lay emphasis on what the man does to pamper himself, in a hat-tip to the changing aspirations of men.

However, observers point out that Vimal is yet to go the whole hog to regain the consumer's attention."Vimal is a brand which can easily create top-of-the-mind recall if it picks up its advertising.

It has to use television, as well, to create that awareness," says Prashant Agrawal, joint-managing director of Wazir Advisors.

Vimal faces competition from Digjam and OCM Suitings, apart from Raymond. The entry of foreign brands too have had an impact. The ground that Vimal has ceded has gone to its competition who have notched up better brand recall.

The problem of the category also remains - the consumer has increasingly been leaning towards branded apparel rather than branded fabric.