“So, even though the ticket sizes are high, but the overall value that we bring in is so good from design, inspiration to detailing to the quality of the material inside the product, the exceptional store experience, and of course final exchange value as well, it is a monetary asset as well even though you are buying it as an accessory and as symbol of your personal expression and all that,” says CV Venkataraman, MD, Titan.
Well consumer indulgence in premiumisation has really aided sentiment across product categories. Your studded jewellery mix was around 26% in the quarter gone by, but as of now what is the overall trend like because there was a bit of a slowdown that we saw in Q1 in certain segments, has that started to pick up again?
CV Venkataraman: If you look at the pyramid of the income classes, we see that the top two income classes are going to double in share by 2030 and the number of households in the top income class, the elites, is also going in that same direction and people are becoming much more confident about their incomes and their wealth and clearly opening their purses to spend on exquisite things of all types including jewellery. And jewellery in India has got an advantage also because it is a store of value with a pretty good exchange value which Titan company offers and Zoya offers as well. So, even though the ticket sizes are high, but the overall value that we bring in is so good from design, inspiration to detailing to the quality of the material inside the product, the exceptional store experience, and of course final exchange value as well, it is a monetary asset as well even though you are buying it as an accessory and as symbol of your personal expression and all that.
Also, the retail jewellery market that has a new competitor as well, the Aditya Birla Group with their brand called Indriya. What is the strategy to tackle this uptick in competition and what does this really mean for say Zoya and the other Tanishq segments?
CV Venkataraman: I happen to visit the Indriya store in Indore just one week back and I can tell you with total conviction that Indriya is not at all playing in the space where Zoya is. Indriya is very much in the space where Tanishq is playing, yes. So, the brand Tanishq has to watch out in a sense, keep an eye on Indriya and brands like Indriya, but Indriya has got no role to play in where Zoya is.
So, let us really shift focus here and let us really essentially talk about the customer base and the luxury trend which is poised to continue in northern states. Now, we understand that you have opened up Helios store in Punjab and set up some ambitious targets for the region. What is the approach towards the store addition? Is it diversification towards south on the cards?
CV Venkataraman: We have a certain deep understanding of the customer profile of Zoya. So, they are global in their thinking, global in their exposure, very discriminating in their taste, they are willing to pay a very good premium for an overall value of the total experience that a luxury product gives them, they are more confident about themselves and they want to acquire the finest things in around them and make them part of their lives. This understanding has been developed over the last many years and we know where such people live in the country and so we go typically where they live and put up the stores in those cities, broadly in the localities where they live or convenient to where they live, so that is the broad approach.
We will go wherever that takes us. But it is not going to be dozens of cities, it is not going to be hundreds of stores and so on and so forth, so that is the broad approach. For example, our Chennai store I am sure will also cater to a lot of discriminating customers who are living in Coimbatore which is a city of that type, to some extent Madurai and so on and so forth. So, people from there can come to the Chennai store and buy rather than us opening a store in these two cities in Tamil Nadu as well.
But maybe two or three or four years later we may open a store in one of these two cities as well, so that is the kind of thinking about distribution that we have. From a same store growth point of view, we do not actually share at the sub-brand level, it is more at the jewellery business level.
A word on the pricing and product pipeline and not only in the jewellery segment, but across wearables as well. Is pricing something which is coming back?
CV Venkataraman: One of the things which has been in the making in the building is actually the differentiation that Titan brings into every category that it operates in, into the wearables category as well.
And we expect to see some strengthening of all that during calendar 24 and early parts of 2025. This is a category that we were a late entrant into as we have spoken even in the past and to that extent it has taken us a little longer to build that differentiation.
And it is through that differentiation that we will build a business which is very strong in a customer value proposition front and delivering reasonable returns to the company in the overall portfolio as well. And we expect to launch, there are many new products which are fashtech as I would call it, bringing in the technology and fashion combination in the smart wearables line up in the next many months. And through that we want to build that differentiation in the market and do better than in the past.
