Tata Group has been Inditex SA’s partner operating Zara stores in India for nearly a decade. The country’s largest conglomerate is now building its own apparel business, which will offer merchandise as trendy as Zara, but at half the price. Trent Ltd., owned by the Group, has fine-tuned its supply chain to deliver ‘extreme fast fashion’, which can get runway styles to consumers in just 12 days, which is the same timeline that has helped Inditex to become a US $ 90 billion empire. Trent is planning to open 40 outlets of its flagship Westside chain each year and hundreds of its Zudio stores, where everything costs under US $ 15, across India, said Chairman Noel Tata.
“The middle class is growing, incomes have grown, Indians are travelling more and they have more money to spend. Now that we’ve built this capability and this model that’s working so well, it’s time to grow faster,” Tata said. Trent is a part of the US $ 111 billion Tata conglomerate, and is hoping that its quick and responsive supply chain will help it to become as ubiquitous in the country as Zara is in the West.
A report by the World Economic Forum said that India’s total household spending will quadruple from US $ 1.5 trillion currently to US $ 6 trillion by 2030. And, with fashion sense getting better among the consumers, Trent is going in the right direction doing sprints once a month wherein it turns a trend spotted on Instagram or a foreign catwalk into a limited run in select stores, in 12 days. If the product does well, it goes to a full run, which takes around 60 days to go from designer’s sketches to store shelves. The retail firm is trying to slash that time to 40 days, using tricks like holding fabric stock.
