Reliance Retail extends Urban Ladder’s presence at Smart Bazaar outlets

Leading retailer Reliance has extended the presence of its furniture and home decor brand Urban Ladder at its hypermarkets chain Smart Bazaar and also through b2b institutional sales.

Reliance Retail, which owns lingerie brands Clovia, Amante, and Zivame, also said that it has now become a market leader in the women’s innerwear market.

“Our new businesses in lingerie, we are making good progress. We are the largest player in this segment now,” said Reliance Retail CFO Dinesh Taluja during Friday’s earnings call of RIL.

Now Reliance Retail is looking to expand the lingerie category across retail formats such as Trends, Azorte, Centro and Blushlace, he said.

“We continue to expand our in-house brands and we operate across the spectrum from mid-premium to luxury. We are focusing on general trade so that these brands have wide distribution, which will further deepen the penetration, and that continues to be a focus for all our brands in the portfolio within this segment,” Taluja added.

Over Urban Ladder, now an omni-channel business, the focus is to provide more and more touch points to the customer, Taluja said.

At these stores, customers can touch and feel the product through experience centres as well as by online or in the stores, he said.

“We are also expanding the category by putting it under many of the Smart Bazaars that we have launched so that it adds a new category into our Smart Bazaar portfolio. We’ve also recently forayed into the institutional sales within the segment,” he said.

Smart Bazaars are chain of hypermarkets operated by Reliance Retail.

Besides, Reliance Retail, which has launched its own FMCG brand ‘Independence’, is expanding it to pan-India.

“Independence brand which we had launched earlier in the year continues its growth momentum. We are now expanding it nationally as well as expanding it to multiple categories,” he said.

Its cola brand Campa is also doing well and has had very good traction.

“The focus for the business has been to expand the distribution channel and deepen the engagement with general trade. We delivered 4x growth in revenue in this business during the quarter,” it said.

Reliance Retail is expanding its FMCG play through several acquisitions.

“During the quarter we completed the acquisition of a majority stake in Ed-a-Mamma which is a kids’ wear brand as well as we completed acquisition of a controlling stake in Superdry IP for India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh territory,” said Taluja.

Reliance on Friday reported an increase of 21.04 per cent in its net profit in the September quarter to Rs 2,790 crore. Its revenue from operation surged 19.48 per cent to Rs 68,937 crore, helped by growth across consumption baskets, increase in footfalls and store expansion.