Now, Bender wants to not just be an observer, but wants a bit of the action too. So, he’s tied up with Prateek Apparels, a Bangalore-based textiles firm to set up 60 stores across the country in the next 12 months and he hopes that Kanz will act as a catalyst in transitioning the kids wear market into a branddriven one, much like the course taken by ‘adult’ apparel categories over the last few years.
“The market for branded kids wear is around Rs 1,300 crore; but the overall market is much larger at over Rs 12,000 crore, so there is a long way to go for us,” Bender recently said on a visit to Bangalore. While he has already signed on Prateek Apparels under a licensee agreement and hopes to eventually step that up to a joint venture partnership, Kanz will have his hands full trying to make a name for itself in a highly fragmented and unorganised market.
“We are an unknown quantity in the Indian market,” Bender admits, “we will spend at least Rs 2-3 crore on getting ourselves recognised in India.” Aside from a few established names in the Indian kids wear market (both home-grown like Gini & Jony and upscale labels), few buyers hunt for brands in this market, Bender argues. “We want to change this mindset and we have been studying the Indian market for two years to put our strategy in place,” says Bender. To try and walk the tightrope between cost and quality, Kanz has aggressively priced its clothes in between Rs 499 and Rs 1,000 and will use these rates as a carrot to attract people to its products.
Bender will lean on his experience in other emerging markets, including Turkey and China, to try and make a dent in the Indian market. “The Chinese market is much more evolved than India; many bigticket American and European labels have set up shop there already, but I think the Turkish market is in a similar stage of evolution to India and we could transplant them (our learnings there) to our Indian operations,” says Bender.
Aside from India as a market for its products, Kanz is looking to make India a global hub for sourcing, with the company already sourcing 2-3 million units and expected to step that up substantially in the next couple of years. “Chinese manufacturers want massive volumes and Bangladesh may offer cut-throat rates, but the political situation there is volatile and unpredictable,” Bender says about the competition. He discloses that Kanz will instead shutter an expensive facility in Turkey and move more production to India.
While Kanz has successfully branched out beyond its core western European markets in its search for faster revenue growth, Asia and India may be where the real growth lies in future.
