‘Consumption has skyrocketed’: Noel Tata on building Westside, Zudio at HTLS

When Trent opened its first Westside store in 1999, a shareholder asked the company, “Kya aap log cutpiece bechne wale hain?” (Are you going to sell cut pieces?). That is how unfamiliar modern retail was in India, Noel Tata said on Saturday.

“Trent was really a pioneer in retail. When we first started our first store, there were only two other shops of significance in India,” Tata said at the 24th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit. He said he had “spent 69 years of my life avoiding the front stage.”

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The biggest early decision, he said, was to sell private labels instead of other companies’ brands. “We took the more difficult decision. We said we will do private label, which entails that you have to design the product yourself. It’s your own brand. And therefore we really became the first D2C business in India, where we went all the way from fabric and we owned the chain all the way to selling to our customers, where we had to live or die by the product that we put on the shelves.”

Expectations were modest at first. In the early years the company thought the format might support 10 stores in India. Ten years later it thought “50, 60 stores, maybe India can take.”

“But in the last, since 2015-16, the last 10 years, consumption has just skyrocketed in India across different socio-economic categories, to the point that today we are 320-odd stores and we are looking to see when we can reach 500-plus stores of Westside,” he said. “While the team has done a fantastic job in addressing the opportunity, I think full credit has to go to the economy, to India, the way consumption is growing.”

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Trent launched Zudio in 2016 on the same idea. “There was aspiration for something better at every level of income. It was not that this aspiration for better product was only in the top metros or with the wealthy. The aspiration went down all the way,” Tata said. “So we said, how can we address in a way the bottom of the pyramid?”

Zudio started in the metros with 6,000 sq ft air-conditioned stores and prices from ₹199 to ₹999. “That was 2016. And till today, 10 years later, the price points remain exactly the same,” he said.

Zudio now has more than 1,000 stores and has never sold online. Tata said that when people asked how it would work without e-commerce, the company’s answer was that it would guarantee the quality of the product. “I think it’s the first brand which has reached 15,000 crores of sales, which is selling this year about 400 million units across the thousand stores. And we’ve never been on e-commerce,” he said. It has also not advertised. “Not a single advertisement other than when we celebrated the thousandth store.”

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Tata said not enough is said about India’s consumption story. “One in six people on this planet resides in India. That is a massive opportunity not just for us, but every one of us in this country,” he said. Over the last few years, he said, demand has spread into tier-2 and tier-3 towns. “We’re quite amazed by the consumption story in even tier-3 towns, which really shows how the economy is really moving up.”

He said he has taken this message to the other group consumer companies he has worked with, including Titan and Voltas. “As incomes rise, the disposable income on things other than food keeps growing, and we’re seeing that throughout all our consumer companies.”