BIBA – Dressing the Women of Urban India
Code : LDS0051 |
Region : Asia |
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THE JOURNEY: Meena, a 39-year-old housewife in Mumbai, found that she enjoyed designing clothes. Deciding to turn her hobby into an avenue for earing some pocket money, she took a loan of Rs.8000 from Syndicate Bank and set up a small establishment. Meena said, “I wanted to keep busy and earn some extra money, pocket money. That’s why I started designing clothes”. She bought some fabric, hired a tailor, and set to work in Mumbai. She teamed up with a block printer and used his big factory to create her first piece of clothing. Initially, she experimented with a variety of designs and techniques like tie and dye , khari printing, mirror work, and foil stamping. Through trial and error, she designed 40 salwar suits in the first batch, all priced less than Rs.200.. THE GROWTH: Even though BIBA had an annual revenue of Rs. 250 Mn in 2002, the brand was not too well known. Neither did it have any retail store of its own. Siddharth successfully addressed this gap and BIBA got its first retail store in 2004 at Inorbit Mall in Mumbai (Refer to Exhibit II). With this, BIBA’s expansion went up to an altogether different level. The retailer began booking retail spaces wherever it found a good mall coming up.. VENTURING INTO DIGITAL: In 2014, BIBA created an online store so that customers did not even have to visit the physical stores. Siddharth recognized the opportunity opening up in front of them in the form of digital media and decided to make the most of it. In line with Siddharth’s focus on digital media, Futurebrands hired the firm Brandmovers to create and manage BIBA’s Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts. It also ventured into blogs and other collaborative digital media.. CHALLENGES: Throughout BIBA’s journey, one of the crucial decision points was to commercialize the family venture to suit the needs of retail giants like Shoppers Stop and Pantaloons. With this move, the founders lost some of their independence in the way they worked. The focus shifted from innovation to quality standardization. A cost cut became necessary to fulfill the demands of the dealers. There was tremendous pressure to meet deadlines.. ROAD AHEAD: In 2019, Siddharth had targeted capturing a market share of between 4% and 8%, which translated to a topline of Rs. 30 Bn. To reach such ambitious numbers, he had plans to open 200 more stores in India as well as in new international markets like the Middle East and South East Asia by 2022..
Exhibit I : Logo of BIBA |
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