With fashion and design being the core, Brand Concepts Ltd. will continue focusing on adding more licensees in the travel gear, handbags, and small leather goods in 2023
By Sandeep Kumar
Looking back, if you had to pen down your top 3 learnings from 2022, what would they be?
The major learning for us during the FY 2022 was as follows:
- MARTECH is the way to go, as it has yielded good result, we will be focusing on the same.
- Focus on product offering and curating products in the space of affordable luxury.
- Driving customer-first approach further through various touchpoints.
What is the vision 2023 for your brand?
- Strengthening portfolio with more licensee brands that offer fashion and lifestyle
- Diversifying with product portfolio with innovation & sustainability focus in travel gear,
handbags and accessories - Increasing touch points in the Tier I & II cities, without neglecting the Tier III regions.
- With the help of a D2C website, strengthening the base across India.
Tell us about the brand growth in the last cycle? Highlight on the key elements which helped you achieve this number?
In terms of growth, we have grown by 72% in quarter 2, LTL last year (top line) and even this quarter we are expecting great results. We maintained healthy cash flow and brand saliences are extremely great. We will be opening new stores and new geography for achieving this growth.
Tell us about your expansion plans? Tier I or Tier II/III cities, your preferred choice for expansion? Reasons.
Our preferred choice for expansion would be Tier II and Tier III cities, as they account for 61% overall market share in FY 2022. These cities show a positive outlook for growth in the coming years, as compared to Tier I cities which indicates a slower growth rate.
What are the innovative in-store experiences that your brand has introduced to enhance customer experience?
With our ‘customer first” approach, we want to offer something unique, innovative, and sustainable. With this mission, for our licensee brand (Tommy Hilfiger Travel Gear), we launched backpacks with recycled material under the collection name #GoGREEN and
the same experience for the same was curated across all our EBO’s through instore display.
Tell us about the tech innovations implemented and the impact of it?
We are at a very early stage of Martech and we are taking forward steps to strengthen the digital transformation. The first step was to start D2C / brand e-commerce supported with all marketplaces, along with this we have started automation in various departments, use of BI tool for supply chain and managing inventory really helps.
Going forward, which technologies and initiatives are you looking forward to?
The focus areas will be on the customer experience, Phygital stores and Omnichannel presence.
Are the new categories in the pipeline? If yes, please elaborate.
Fashion and design are the core of our business. Keeping that in mind, we would add more licensees for our brands, with the focus on travel gear, handbags, and Small Leather Goods (SLG). We would look at adding innovation and purpose or sustainability in material and
ease of usage or mechanism. We would like to operate in the realm of affordable luxury and hence we would be extremely sensitive in pricing our merchandise.
How are you laying the bricks for growth and success in the New Year? Is it going to be an omnichannel journey or putting action to digital transformation or accelerating processes with technology or something else? Tell us your thoughts.
Product Offering and designing are our core ingredients and with the help of analysis, we make this offering channel specific as per customer preferences. It is like a technology driven approach with a human touch addition to it. To get the relevant market share, in such a diverse market like India, India we have to offer multiple price points in multiple categories without compromising our core strengths.
Elaborate on the initiatives (marketing and digital) which were a success in this period?
In the post-covid world, digital marketing is like hygiene, and focusing on the same is clearly a requirement. At the same time, as we are a consumer-oriented brand and we must focus on experiential marketing and visibility, hence in-store branding and hence BTL
activity is very essential.
We have a KPI focused approach, where we want to optimize every investment in marketing efforts. This approach is supported by automation and content creation and curation giving us better results.
