Gant goes a cut above

MARKETING: Arvind Brands has added another licenced brand to its quiver, and is aiming high.

At the Gant flagship store launch in Mumbai recently, Darshan Mehta, president, Arvind Brands, was busy outlining the virtues of the US-founded but Swedish-owned brand of premium clothing.

"Gant is one of the few brands that, in a short-term-trend-driven fashion industry, has stayed true to its timeless character," he says, "yet is contemporary and trendy."

Arvind Brands, a 100-per cent subsidiary of Arvind Mills, clocked Rs 430 crore in revenue last fiscal, its four licensed foreign brands accounting for two-thirds of that figure. Gant is now its fifth.

And the company is set to add three more brands to the quiver by the end of May 2006: Nautica, a brand of modern American clothing, Kipling, a Belgian bags brand, and Jansport, an American outdoor baggage specialist.

"We will never have couture brands, because we are not about buildings brands in five star lobbies," reasons Mehta, "but we will bring in brands that are the most premium among the pret-a-porter brands available in India."

Gant, with entry-level shirts priced between Rs 3,300 and Rs 7,000, according to Mehta, has no direct competition in the Indian market. Or so at least in terms of pricing, since Gant is some 30 per cent dearer than Arvind's other high-end licensed brand Tommy Hilfiger.

There's money at the high end of the market, Mehta believes, and expansion would be faster had it not been for real estate constraints.

"High street real estate is our biggest problem when launching premium brands in India," he explains. "India has only a handful of high streets where the frontage, visibility and adjacencies are right."

Thankfully, it's still a fairly high margin business, with licensed brands delivering a neat 10-per cent cut "" about twice what a mass market brand would command.

But thinking of the Gant-Hilfiger manoeuvre as an indication of a big shift in strategy would be an error. Arvind isn't about to let go of volumes, and has a plan to sell moderately priced clothes too; regular mass brands are expected to make up two-thirds of the company's revenue some years hence, up from just one-third now. This would require much wider retail presence.

"Department stores in the 330 odd malls under development will enhance our reach through distribution and supply chain efficiency," says Mehta, who has chalked out plans for Lee jeans to flare forth and Arrow shirts to whizz their way further into the market.

All this, even as Gant and Tommy Hilfiger go for the upper end with exclusive stores "" until, as Mehta says, "a Harvey Nichols or Saks arrives in India".

"It's unbelievable that for such a large country, we don't have a single Rs 500-crore apparel brand," says Mehta, "But it won't be long."

Arvind Brands' largest domestic brand is Excalibur, currently at Rs 73 crore.