Masanori Takeda, Executive Vice President in Charge of Overseas Businesses, Nitori Holdings Co., Ltd. speaks about Asia’s leading retailer’s India foray, expansion strategy, and more…
Mumbai: Japan’s largest furniture and furnishings retailer Nitori opened its first store in India at the premium RCity Mall at Ghatkopar in Mumbai last week.
The company, founded by Akio Nitori in 1967 in Sapporo, Japan has a total of 1,049 stores across the world, out of which 838 are in Japan and 211 outside it.
According to the company, last year, over 340 million customers visited its stores, making it a leading home-furnishing brand in Asia.
The company has spared no effort to make its debut store in the country look and feel welcoming. There is even a team from Japan to train the Indian staff in the Nitori way of doing things and ensure a smooth start. Such is the camaraderie between the Indian and the Japanese staff that even the guard in the store can now greet people in Japanese.
The store is neatly organised and offers a large assortment of quality products designed and manufactured by the company—the differentiating factor. The company has simultaneously also started its online operations, offering delivery of furnishings across India and delivery of furniture to Mumbai, Thane, and parts of Navi Mumbai, which it plans to scale soon.
Nitori is excited about the potential India offers and has grand plans for the country, Masanori Takeda, Executive Vice President in Charge of Overseas Businesses, Nitori Holdings Co., Ltd. said. In an exclusive interaction with Indiaretailing, Takeda speaks about its first store, India plans, and more…
Why did you choose Mumbai for your India foray?
Mumbai has a relatively stable temperature all year around, so we need not drastically change the product assortment. Had we chosen Delhi, which has extreme temperatures both during winters and summers, changing the product according to the season would have been a little challenging. Also, Mumbai has a metropolitan crowd, which can help us better understand India as a market.
After studying the market more, we might open in Delhi.
What products have you stocked in your first store?
We have stocked products that are very similar to what we sell in Japan. We sell the same products in the entire ASEAN region especially the products we sell in hot and humid countries.
What’s interesting is that at the Mumbai store, we have 8,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs), which is more than what we have in the rest of Asia. In the ASEAN region, typically we stock about 5,000 SKUs.
Why are the reasons for choosing R City as your entry point?
We chose this location after thorough market research. When we decided to open in Mumbai, we were looking for a location which would give us the kind of footfall we wanted and the kind of customers aligned with our positioning. That’s why we wanted to open the store in one of the top five malls in the city. This particular location and the mall ticked all the boxes for us—it gives us the right platform to present all the products we can bring here and it is strategically located.
How do you differentiate from other leading international brands in the space with similar offerings?
The first is quality, Japanese quality, because of which we cannot compare ourselves to other brands. In Japan, Nitori has a lot more stores compared to other leading brands. We have large, small, and mid-size store concepts so customers can visit anywhere. In fact, in Japan, we have 10 times more sales compared to Ikea.
Tell us about your store opening strategy for India.
Within 10 years we are planning to open 300 stores in India. We will first cover the Mumbai region. The strategy is to have a big store in the centre and several small stores dedicated to home fashion spread across.
The small stores will be about 60% the size of this store. So, if the customer wants to buy furniture they can visit the large store and if they just want to buy home fashion products, they can visit the nearest small store.
We plan to follow the same pattern in other cities which we go to including Delhi, which is where we plan to open next because Delhi weather is similar to that of Japan. It’s challenging but we are thinking about it.
How will your delivery setup work?
We have a distribution centre in Navi Mumbai. For the e-commerce business, we will be shipping products from this store. In due course, we will open more distribution centres and e-commerce deliveries too will be handled by them.
How much are you investing in the India business?
It takes around Rs 5 crore to open one store. And the plan is to open 300 stores…this might give you an idea of the investment. Also, we will be investing in hiring a large number of employees for our stores and distribution centres.
Will you sell on other e-commerce sites?
Yes, we are planning to expand our e-commerce presence and are speaking to a few partners.
