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Wills Sport lines up foray into formal wear

Pradeep Gooptu

The lifestyle retailing business division of ITC Ltd will extend the product range of its 'Wills Sport' range of branded apparel by introducing a wider range of relaxed formal wear for men and women.

The brand had initially displayed a preference for sporting or relaxed wear and underplayed the formal aspect.

Now, it would be taking on well-entrenched brands in the highly competitive formal wear category in contrast to virtually non-existent competition in the women's formal wear branded market.

"A more formal menswear range would hit the stores soon," Sanjiv Keshava, chief executive of ITC's lifestyle retailing business division, said. It will be retailed through the Will Lifestyle stores, the 41st of which was inaugurated in Kolkata on Friday.

"The range has been internationally benchmarked and positioned somewhere between GAP and Banana Republic in terms of the work, leisure and party oriented product mix", he added.

Wills Sport has gone in for global sourcing for fabrics and raw materials as well as sourcing from domestic vendors as well as those in China and Bangladesh for finished products to bring international finish, quality and styles to the garments.

Wills Sport has also commissioned its Gurgaon-based Design and Development Centre. "DDC has helped ITC bring into the country world-class CAD based design and production systems and help upgrade domestic vendors and suppliers," Keshava pointed out.

The fabric optimisation software at the centre for example minimises the fabric wasted in the cutting process and gives appreciable savings, "as fabrics constitute 60 per cent of the cost of the garment," he added.

The centre may have entailed higher initial investment but has helped the company sharply reduce the time to market for new products besides the cost savings.

Under normal circumstances a design concept executed through outsourcing would take anything between three weeks to a couple of months to attain perfection. The centre has cut down that time to 48-60 hours.

At the retail level, a comprehensive customer relationship management package was being implemented to retain customers.

Most Wills Sport buyers were going in for repeat purchases while new buyers were being targetted through direct marketing, Keshava said.

Besides setting up the targetted 55 Wills Lifestyle stores by June, the target would be to build sales volumes at the existing ones.

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