“Beauty products will be a key focus for us from now on along with footwear and underwear”, Noel Tata, non-executive chairman of Trent said in an interview.
Key points to note –
- Simone Tata, Noel Tata’s mother, had helped create Lakme in 1953 as the country’s first cosmetics brand. It was sold to Unilever’s Indian unit in 1998.
- While Tatas relaunched beauty products in 2014 , it remained one amongst many other categories.
- Tata is considering building new lines of in-house cosmetic brands.
- Very likely Nykaa’s successful IPO has jolted everyone and especially the old business houses giving them a fear of missing out feeling.
- Along with Westside physical stores and Tata Cliq online portal, Tata aims to utilise every channel to push the mentioned categories. Tatas are also scheduled to launch a super app soon consolidating customers of their varied businesses.
- The revenue from beauty, footwear and underwear category is estimated at about $100 million for Trent against the estimated total market size of $30 billion.
Beauty, footwear and underwear no doubt are categories with significant potential. However, there are reasons why only few are successful in each of these categories.
For now, given the strong public and private markets, they seem the logical ones to explore.
However, I have no doubt that they would continue to remain difficult.