Bata India Limited will focus more on women’s fashion footwear and bring down the average age of buyers through redevelopment of stores and engagement with influencers, said its managing director Gunjan Shah.
“Women’s fashion, especially oriented towards occasions, whether it’s wedding or otherwise has been an area that we could have done much more in the past,” Shah told ET. “We have embarked on it under the Red Label brand. We are infusing a lot more fast fashion in it, and we need to bring in many more options and varieties to consumers and keep changing them regularly.”
The footwear firm has reported subdued growth in revenue from operations for the April-June period, with 2% year-on-year increase to Rs 9,58 crore. Net profit stood at Rs 107.8 crore during the quarter, Rs 11.5 crore lower than a year ago, primarily on account of early start of end of season sale by the industry.
“We have for the last 18-24 months, post-Covid, managed to shift the newness of the offerings to consumers in our stores on average from 25% to about 35%, and that’s a big shift in making sure every season consumers see new products and new styles and collections,” said Shah.
Bata India chairman Ashwani Windlass said despite normalisation of demand for footwear and an initial surge, the company continued to refresh the product portfolio with the strategy of casualisation and premiumisation.
“There is a huge amount of change that has been done in the back-end which includes the entire design philosophy, positioning of the brand, campaigning and product portfolio. This is not something that happens overnight, there is a perception that you kind of create and you want to win over, which takes time,” said Windlass.
On the current slowdown, Shah said it is very difficult to pin to a single reason.
“It’s a combination of two-three things; consumers have seen a lot of inflation in the fashion, apparel footwear space. We are also very conscious and have not taken any price hike for the last eight-nine months. It’s also a question of wedding occasion days, which has moved around a little,” Shah said.
Bata India expects that, unlike the past two-three months, growth will be robust in the medium term.
“End of season sale (EOSS) helped a lot. Whatever growth we saw was significantly volume backed but EOSS did see a robust response, in fact much better than expected, but we would have liked to see better growth in the quarter that went by,” said Shah.
The company is seeing more stress in the mass prices segment. It has managed to bring down the average age of consumer by a few years over the past four-five years and said it’s a long journey.
“We need to make sure that we are tying with the right kind of influencers making sure we’ve got the right mediums and channels on it. That’s going to be our endeavour, to keep pushing this age down, therefore making the brand more relevant,” said Shah.
The company is also focusing on store renovations to change the perception of buyers.
