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Style in store

Abhilasha Ojha and Arti Sharma

It began famously after industrialist Yash Birla went furniture shopping and couldn't find a sofa that he liked in Mumbai. Being Birla, he did the logical thing and, a year ago, opened Yantra, a plush lifestyle store that sells scorchingly expensive products like the Marc Ottoman that moulds to the contours of your body - if you can afford the Rs 200,000 price tag.

Then, two months ago, Birla teamed up with interior designer Mustafa Eisa and converted two floors of a disused mill in Worli into a sprawling 20,000-sq ft showroom. On sale at the new store called ME is everything from middle-market Italian furniture to glassware, wallpaper, flooring and even kitchen appliances. Says Eisa: "Yantra being the top end of the market, ME fits into the middle segment."

Birla has ambitious plans for his two lifestyle stores. But he isn't the only one who has decided that India's middle-class needs to fill its homes with sleeker, more stylish - and expensive - products. The result: a clutch of lifestyle stores dotted around India's metros that sell everything from Fiam bent-glass chairs (Rs 128,000) to Philippe Starck lemon squeezers (a snip at Rs 4,077).

Cut to Delhi where Abhinav Khandelwal is reaching his customers from a different direction at his new suburban store fcml. Khandelwal reckons that the bathroom is the first part of the house to get the luxury fittings treatment.

So, he sells everything from fibre-glass washbasins on chrome stands for about Rs 80,000 and Grohe Aqua Towers for about Rs 195,000 (the Aqua Tower is basically an overhead shower with accompanying side showers and hand showers. A thermostat regulates the temperature). Says Khandelwal: "Bathrooms have become the epicentre of the house and people attack the bathroom first even before they think about the living room appointments."

On a slightly different level, walking into Anita Lal's Verandah is a bit like entering a stately - but comfortable - home. Comfort with a vivid, eastern touch, is the watchword at Verandah. Near the entrance of the store in Mehrauli, Delhi, are bookshelves filled with volumes on design, interiors and gardens.

Further inside, there's teak furniture from Bali and more contemporary stuff from Raghuvendra Rathore. A collection of hand-knotted carpets by Rooplata Kumari of Jaipur completes the picture. The carpets reproduce Mughal designs in wool. An 8x10 carpet in muted colours with Mughal motifs sells for Rs 120,000. Says Lal: "It's not ethnic but rather a global style which is prevalent in countries with warmer climates."

There are others too, who've are trying to change the layout of the Indian homestead. In Bangalore, there's Cinnamon and Yamini, and in Mumbai there are stores like Comma. And, in Delhi, there's Interiors Espania, Renaissance Homes, INDI Store and the House of Ishatvam.

Says Anjalika Kripalani of Renaissance Homes: "A good lifestyle store should offer a complete package of not just elegant furniture but also rich fabrics, fabulous lighting and scores of exquisite accessories."

What do these upmarket islands have in common? Most sell a mix of Indian crafts combined with upmarket imported furniture. Take ME, which is tying up with an Austrian company for lighting and a Danish company for other accessories. It also buys lights designed by Mumbai-based Dilip Chhabria and glassware by designer Jyoti Khanna.

It's a similar mix in most of the other stores. The bathroom products might come from countries like Germany or Britain. The furniture - at the top end - comes from countries like Italy, Spain or even the United States.

At a slightly lower level, it might come from countries like Indonesia or Malaysia. And watch out for top-of-the-line brands like Alessi or Philippe Starck. Says Pankaj Verma of INDI Store: "We're living in a brand-conscious and a brand-driven market. Earlier, brand names were relegated to the garment industry but today it has extended to homes, furnishings and accessories."

These new kids on the retailing block have big plans for the future. ME hopes to open two stores in Delhi and Pune in the next six months and it is also planning forays into Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad in the not too distant future. And Yantra, will be opening in Delhi by next February in a building owned by Birla.

Others too are moving swiftly. In August, Yamini opened two stores in Delhi and Ahmedabad. It now has six branches around the country and is planning two more stores in Gurgaon and Chandigarh by next year. And, Lal is moving to Mumbai early next year.

Similarly, Interiors Espania, which opened a sprawling 22,000-sq ft showroom in March 2001 in Gurgaon, has already opened two more stores in Delhi and another in Mumbai. Another one is scheduled to open soon in Ludhiana. Next on the cards is a southern foray. And fcml, which opened in October 2001, is hoping to change bathroom fashion in Mumbai, Chennai and Ludhiana. The next store is scheduled to open in about 40-45 days.

Are Indians really ready for dining tables, sofas and other household accessories with six-figure price tags? Surprisingly enough, the answer appears to be a cautious yes. The owners of most lifestyle stores are cagey about any figures but many are expanding in a fashion that indicates cash is coming in. Khandelwal says that fcml has done 25 per cent more business in its first year than it had originally targeted.

Similarly, Interiors Espania's CEO Rohit Das reckons that business is likely to be 80 per cent higher in the second year than it was in the first. Says Rachna Bakshi, the manager of Yamini's New Delhi store: "The purchasing power of Indians has definitely increased and more importantly they've realised the importance of quality products in their homes."

Or, look at Renaissance Homes, which won't talk about sales figures but, which has an inventory of around Rs 2.5 crore (Rs 25 million). It plans to increase inventory to around Rs 4 crore by importing a range of furniture and products from four new international companies. Similarly, fcml has stocked products worth about Rs 4 crore (Rs 40 million) and has paid stiff duties upfront of about 100 per cent on them.

But lifestyle stores certainly don't attract huge numbers of customers like a supermarket. In fact, a casual visitor to Yantra might be forgiven for thinking that the store is on the verge of going out of business. Kaajal Anand, CEO, Birla Lifestyles reckons that the shop gets only about 20 buyers a month. At ME, the calculations are slightly different. The giant store gets about 50 visitors a day out of which about four or five end up buying. By January, it plans to launch an advertising blitzkrieg and Eisa reckons that about 150 visitors will troop through the store daily after that. He is hoping to rake in about Rs 45 lakh (Rs 4.5 million) a month once everything is in place.

The styles being sold at these stores vary. Interiors Espania retails contemporary furniture that wouldn't be out of place in any corner of the world. Says Das: "Our store caters to the functional design requirements of modern offices and homes with a perfect blend of aesthetics and ergonomics."

Whatever the style, the fact is that an increasingly large number of buyers clearly don't seem to worry about cost. Stores like Coverline and Villa d'este specialise in turning out custom-made furniture for buyers.

And Coverline has an interesting twist: owner Vinita Singh and her team will offer to design the furniture here and then have it made in Singapore. "A customer can walk into our store with a design element in mind and sure enough we will implement it," says Singh.

For many stores there has been a steep learning curve. Initially, Yantra had a coffee shop called Coffee Mantra but they discovered quickly that it wasn't doing very well. Now the interiors have been reorganised and the coffee shop has been pushed into a small corner.

And it has experimented with promotions to draw in more customers. The store recently tied up with La Prarie, an internationally recognized skincare brand. Next year, it plans more such events that will be held at three-month intervals. Says Anand: "I don't think advertising works for a product like Yantra at all so we're not going to do that. Currently, we're pretty much working on word of mouth."

Who are the masterminds behind these stores? Eisa, for instance, is an interior designer who graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York. He's also hoping to turn ME into a design centre where customers come for total solutions for their homes. And Shaifalika Panda, vice-president, Renaissance Homes, did management studies from Boston University.

Her partner, Anjalika Kripalani, did an interior design course from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. "We're a successful team because we're an amalgamation of both design and management," says Panda.

But others have strayed into the business after trying their hand at other fields. Take Lal, for instance, who made a foray into the business by selling pottery products under the Good Earth label. She relies on an instinctive feel for what the market wants. By contrast, fcml's Khandelwal was already selling upmarket fittings and products to five star hotels. This was a natural extension to reach a larger numbers of buyers.

Some companies are looking into the future to an era when they won't be importing in large quantities. Eisa says they have considered manufacturing locally and that it might be done in a shed owned by Birla's Zenith Steel in Khapoli.

Says Eisa: "Backward integration will help us reduce the lag in our delivery schedules and, in my opinion, factories for sofas and beds are pretty much the same no matter which part of the world one goes to."

That's thinking into the future. Most lifestyle storeowners are still concentrating on getting the looks right in a tough business. And keeping their pulse on what the demanding Indian customer wants.

With inputs from Anuradha Kapoor

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