Retail gets personal: How brands are fast learning what you want

India Today

03-06-2025

Retail is transforming fast with 'phygital' and 'omnichannel' as buzzwords, allowing customers to order online, pick offline and vice versa. The trend was discussed in the panel discussion 'Brick & Mortar in a Digital World: Retail's Road Ahead' at the recent Indo-UAE Conclave 2025 in Dubai, organised by the India Today Group, where speakers analysed the strengths of physical stores and how digital is being used to augment those benefits while bringing in cost and inventory optimisation for businesses.Neeraj Teckchandani, CEO of the UAE-based fashion and retail conglomerate Apparel Group, said each of the retailers today is in the world of omnichannel or what is now called connected commerce.advertisementApparel Group today has close to 2,400 stores across 14 countries, of which roughly 1,900-plus are within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), besides a large e-commerce business, 6thStreet.com. 'It's no longer digital versus physical, but about how you catch the consumer,' Teckchandani said.Today, the consumer journey starts with digital. Around 75 per cent of the time, the customer has already done all the research or looked at the product online. And then, the transaction may end up at the retail store—or not. This allows the flexibility to buy online but refund or exchange at the store, or vice versa, he says.
Apparel Group has also ventured into quick commerce, wherein they are offering 60-minute delivery and using their network of 1,900 retail stores as fulfilment centres for online orders.Kuruvilla Markose, CEO, international business, Titan Company Limited, shared how digital commerce is rising in India but offline had its own critical mass. Sharing an example, he said when they acquired CaratLane in 2016, it was an online company with about Rs 600 crore in revenue, of which 99.5 per cent came from online sales.advertisementCaratLane crossed Rs 4,000 crore last year. And from 99.5 per cent, revenue online has dropped to just 8 per cent, with in-store revenue now contributing 92 per cent. 'Today, the sweet spot is in the middle. You can't just be digital, and you can't just be a traditional physical company—you've got to be in both spaces,' said Markose.The key thing is that in every category, there's a price point below which people are very comfortable buying online. So in India, for watches, it's about $40—anything below that, people are happy to buy online; anything above that, they prefer to see it in stores. In jewellery, that threshold is around $200. This varies from category to category, he added.On leveraging technologies like AVRs or artificial intelligence, Teckchandani said brands are building 'stores of the future', which offer full experience and digital transformation for customers at the store level. For instance, they have installed smart mirrors at their Tommy Hilfiger store and have a phygital store established in Dubai Hills Mall—the first in the region. This includes mobile point of sale and frictionless checkout. Even the loyalty programme is offered through a mobile app instead of a plastic card.Technologies, said Teckchandani, are also being used to improve backend operations. These include a lot of digital tools which are used for store transfer optimisation, markdown optimisation, price optimisation and allocation optimisation. 'All of these ensure the product is where it should be and where the consumer is—creating a positive customer journey by ensuring that you carry the best SKUs (stock keeping units) in the same store.'advertisementMarkose said the India and UAE markets have been closely linked for a long time. Commerce and trade between the Middle East and India began 2,000 to 4,000 years ago with the spice trade between the Arabs and Kerala.As a result, the Middle East was their first preferred destination to take the Tanishq brand outside India, due to the large Indian diaspora. But they had to adapt it to suit the retail market in the Middle East. For instance, the store formats there are much smaller than in India.In India, some of their stores are 30,000 sq ft—that size and scale doesn't work in the UAE. Another aspect was that jewellery sales in the UAE is very transactional. The levels of customer service that Tanishq provides in India were not really the norm here. Even something as simple as seating in the stores was uncommon as consumers usually walk in, do the deal, and walk out.advertisementOne of the things Markose pointed out was that retail has moved from a time when there were limited choices to now, where there is an overwhelming abundance. 'Consumers sometimes struggle with what to pick. So, the game is shifting toward personalisation,' he said, adding that the question now is: how do I know you as an individual? How do I know what you're interested in, what you've purchased? How do I build a relationship where I can predict what you're likely to be interested in? For instance, in Tanishq, which offers around 60,000 different SKUs, how do we figure out and present the few products that you will actually like?Subscribe to India Today Magazine