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Miniso on expansion spree, to set up 800 stores by 2020

The Japanese retail brand has opened 67 stores in just 1.5 years in India. The brand believes in staying away from advertising and instead in reinvesting its profits in developing stores and product quality

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BestMediaInfo Bureau
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Miniso on expansion spree, to set up 800 stores by 2020

Miniso is on a store launch ride in India. Founded in 2011, the Japanese retail brand opened its first India store in August 2017 and now has 67 stores across the metro cities. Keeping a very high target for itself, the brand intends to open around astounding 800 stores pan India by 2020.

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Young Liu

“Until 2020, our plan is to have 800 stores pan India. If you look at our speed, in 1.5 years, we already have 67 stores,” said, Young Liu, Chief Business Development Officer at Miniso.

In a country like India, where brands are heavily built on advertising and its success and failures are judged on its brand-building capabilities, it’s very brave of Miniso to open stores in huge numbers and spend nothing on advertising. Liu said, “We would like to give our profits back to our customers. If we’ll advertise like Oppo and Vivo and get celebrities on board, definitely it will increase the cost of our products. Instead, we will use that money to develop and research better stock keeping units (SKUs). That is how our price is very affordable.”

Although the brand is steadily gaining grounds in the country, it wasn’t an easy game for the Japanese company to start shop here. Liu said, “At first it was a little headache in order to explain this brand to the market. There hasn’t been a business model like this before in India. But when we first opened our stores, we started getting good footfalls and consumer love.”

Liu told BestMediaInfo.com that two things that have helped fetch Miniso consumer trust are the check they maintain on the quality of products and the prices across the SKUs. The brand has kept profits on the products marginal currently. “Whenever we get profits, we reinvest them in our own warehouses, stores, logistics and SAP system. We have also signed a strategic alliance with IBM and trying to find the SAP for the Indian and the global company also.”

Currently, Miniso doesn’t have plans to partner with the e-commerce players in India and its priority is to expand the stores in different countries and let the customers know more about the brand globally. Liu said, “Globally the trend is that people go to offline rather than online to choose clothes and cosmetics. A consumer wants to feel something before buying. Buying online decreases the happiness of the shopping.”

The brand is targeting to source around 30% of products from India. Miniso has currently zeroed on snacks and socks to export from India to its stores in 60+ countries.

According to Liu, the only challenge that the brand faces in India is the lack of good shopping malls in India. “We want to open our stores at good places, but right now we haven’t found good shopping malls. We want to open Miniso stores in complexes that have cinema and food courts at the same time.”

According to the reports, the company achieved its annual target of  Rs 700-crore revenue for 2017-18. The brand’s most selling category among all is beauty and care.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Miniso spree 800 stores by 2020
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