Visit to Westside, Jaipur

“Retail Chains do more than bargain down prices from suppliers or divide fixed costs across a lot of units. They rapidly spread economic discovery - the scarce and costly knowledge of what retail concepts and operational innovations actually work.” Virginia Postrel For understanding more about retailing , merchandise management and marketing management in practical life, 21 students of Business Studies department of The IIS University visited the Westside on 25th February, 2015 under the guidance of Dr. Aditi R. Khandelwal, Asst. Prof., and Department of Business Studies. Established in 1998 as part of the Tata Group, Trent Ltd. operates Westside, one of India’s largest and fastest growing chains of retail stores. The Westside stores have numerous departments to meet the varied shopping needs of customers. These include menswear, women’s wear, kid’s wear, footwear, cosmetics, perfumes and handbags, household accessories, lingerie and gifts. The company has already established 90 Westside departmental stores (measuring 15000-30000 sq. feet each). It is a women oriented store and mainly focuses on two things (a) product quality and (b) ambience. In Jaipur, Westside was established in 2007 in City Pulse Mall at Narayan Singh Circle. For understanding the retailing strategy adopted by Westside, there was a session with the store manager. In this session, he shared about the promotional strategy, layout pattern, buying process of brands, sales forecasting methods, communication process , store layout , visual merchandising , etc. In Westside Store, there is 70% area covered with their own brands and rest 30% is other. Their buying process of brands is decided by the separate department of employees who are engaged in observing the new fashion. It was also observed by one of the students, who visited the Westside stores of Delhi and Mumbai, that there was a difference between the stuff of Delhi and Jaipur stores. The store manager told that the reason behind this difference is culture. Culture of Delhi or Mumbai is different from culture of Jaipur or Jodhpur. For the sales forecasting, mainly they observed their past sales and accordingly forecast their future sales. It was a very good session with the store manager which helped the students to gain practical knowledge about various aspect related to field of marketing in general and retailing and merchandise management in specific. This visit will surely help students to gain employability skills required to be placed in retailing sector in future.