Inner wear trends in India have changed drastically. consumers are going for more colourful and sensual choices. The basic black, white and nude shades are replaced by a riot of colours, designs and fi ts to choose from. Vivek Mehta, CEO, MAS Brands, India, reveals to IMAGES Retail, on how Amanté has made its presence through the years.
Amanté made its mark in India in 2007. The brand is part of MAS Brands India, which is a fully owned subsidiary of MAS Holdings, a 35-year old company that started off as a contract manufacturer in Sri Lanka, for brands based in the West. The company primarily has been manufacturing in three different verticals, namely; Intimate wear, performance wear and swim wear for two and- half decades until it launched its own brand, Amanté seven years ago. Currently, Amanté has presence in India and Sri Lanka.
Vivek Mehta, CEO, MAS Brands recollected how the brand started off in two different distribution channels in India, one through MBOs including the traditional mom-and-pop store in neighbourhoods and the later through Large Format Stores (LFS) like Shoppers Stop, Lifestyle, Central and Pantaloons who had started their own intimate section. He said: “Over the last 5-10 years, a lot of LFS or departmental stores have added their own intimate section which resulted in Amanté products getting into the distribution channel as well. Today the brand is present in around 600 stores in India (150 LFS and 450 MBO stores). The third channel, which is relatively new but growing rapidly is the e-business.”
Recently, these e-commerce sites are adding innerwear brands to their overall portfolio simply because of the sheer size of the industry. Amanté has tied-up with e-channels like Myntra, Flipkart, Jabong, Zivame and many other such online portals.
According to Mehta, the size of the industry today would probably be around US$ 3 billion. He added: “Out of the overall size of business, the volume of premium intimate wear is very small and might be around `800 – `1,000 crores in India. There are only a handful of players in organised innerwear retail, with Amnaté being one of the key players.” From the beginning Amanté has focused at putting its foundation right. Therefore, they started everything from scratch and achieved quite a strong retail presence. The initial turn over was quite less, infact less than `3 lakh. However, Mehta believes that the premium intimate wear segment in innerwear industry is growing at 20-25 per cent year-on-year.
He explained: “Obviously, we now are growing at a much faster rate. Year-on-year our compounded average growth has been upward at 30-35 per cent.At this point, the company is focusing at Amanté for its strategic growth.” Mehta is confi dent that the brand would achieve a sizeable business of almost 300 million dollars in the next 5-7 years.
While chalking its growth plan, he stressed that the brand would try to gain entry in one of the Asian countries–Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand or Philippines; either through a subsidiary or by acquiring a brand through partnership with a local player. Withal, India would continue to be at the core of their South East Asian business and would help in the expansion of Amanté’s entire portfolio in the coming seven years. The brand initially started with basic lingerie collection, now they have a wide range of products to showcase including swimwear, sleepwear and activewear.
Creating the right experience
Making themselves present primarilythrough print media, Amanté has long been shying way from TVcommercials and has been intending
at three-fold marketing strategy through retail. “Our core strategy is to create a presence or an experience for the customer. It depends on how
we do it? A research has shown that when customers try for products then they are more likely to end buying it than just walking around the store and asking for sizes. A trial generally induces purchase even though it is not planned,” he explained. Placing trained sales people at stores, no doubt, leverage one’s business; as a consequence Amanté provides extensive training to its sales team with thorough education and knowledge on the right size so that they can give correct information to the customer at the point of purchase. He stated that 80 percent of the business goes wrong when customer end up buying wrong sizes from the store.
Visibility
The product range of Amanté is distributed through three basic channels: fi rstly, the traditional retailer or mom-or-pop stores. These
retailers comprise the bulk of 300 billion distributors in the industry.
The average store size is between 200-500 sq.ft. Products at these stores are usually stacked up in boxes and due to absence of trial rooms visibility of the brand becomes minimal. Though traditional retailers are evolving and re-inventing themselves, yet the brand experience is limited and purchase is constrained at these stores.
Mehta said: “So we are really at the mercy of the retailer or their staff. It is the design that makes the consumer pick our brand over our competitors.
However, that has restricted us at MBOs. When you move to LFS like Shoppers Stop, Lifestyle or other departmental stores, the shopping
experience is better as the display is in a relatively bigger area; nonetheless it is not as big as the other categories.”
Another channel that Amanté operates on is the e-commerce segment, which is growing at a very rapid pace. The brand believes that here the customers are able to click through a wider range of products. Mehta is of he opinion that most of the innerwear brands are investing in online platform and it is especially benefi cial where they have no retail presence.
Consumer behaviour
Amanté’s sales has been favourable from the West and South of India, even though people see North India as a bigger consumer market. Mehta pointed that West India is the biggest market but not the biggest consumer in terms of innerwear purchase. The western and Southern India have more effective distribution channel as compared to the 22 Shoppers Stop stores and 20 Lifestyle stores in the North. He further said, “Primarily because we are a premium brand we tend to do better in LFS than MBOs. And, LFS are present in higher concentration in South and West compared to North India.” Giving customers the ultimate experience is constrained in India as the country is still in its initial stages of taking lingerie to EBO format.
Store format
Amanté launched its fi rst flagship store in Columbo, Sri Lanka last year.
The 2,500 sq.ft. store houses all its collection that include activewear, swimwear, sleepwear and the regular lingerie range that are available in India and Sri Lanka. At present, the brand has not opened stores on similar formats. The brand has plans to open two stores in Delhi and Bengaluru; and more stores through franchise route at key cities like Mumbai, Pune and Chandigarh. Putting a little more perspective into the product range, the brand has brought out more elegant, comfortable and fashion innerwear collection. Hence, Amanté is targeting at 70 per cent growth as compared to
the last year.
A signifi cant amount of change has been observed in consumer preferences over the last 5-10 years. They have started to select different colours in innerwear. Earlier, the black, white and nude shades of innerwear contributed maximum to the sales volume but lately they are the least contributing colours. Therefore, Amanté revamped more than 60 percent of its product line this year. Citing an example, Mehta elaborated: “Even in Delhi, you will find a 55 year old woman walking into a store and asking for a red colour innerwear and not for the traditional black or white colours. All this change is very recent. I think it’s because the aspirations has gone up and people like to associate with a younger, fashion forward brand.” Mehta explained that earlier the consumer spending would be around `500 to `600, but today the average has gone above `1,000. Consumers are willing to spend more (`1,200 to `1,500) if they get the right fit and size.
Manufacturing & production
The brand has over 40 different manufacturing unit across Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia and India; and has design team at Hong Kong, New York and London. They also have a design team in Sri Lanka and India that collect trend reports from around the fashion capitals and translate them into new launch collections.“The great differentiating factor in India is the well placed supply chain and the manufacturing footprint that we have and that give us the ability to bring in new launches to the market very quickly,” said Mehta.
Challenges & hurdles
Unlike in the West where women take pride in walking into a premium innerwear store, customers in India are not comfortable interacting with sales person. Largely, shopping for innerwear is still considered a secret purchase and hence e-commerce retailers have reported a tremendous amount of demand at online platform.
“Another challenge is when you do business with unorganised retailer, you are generally dealing with a personality and not business models; and most of them have different way of operating. This way LFS are more easy to work with as you are working with professionals across the table, talking about partnership and how to invent relationships,” Mehta explained.“There are a lot of customers who could afford our product range and want to be associated with us but the physical retail infrastructure does not provide that, so we have to rely on e-commerce platform, ” concluded Mehta
