Standardizing Retail Operations at W

STANDARDISING RETAIL OPERATIONS AT “W”

TCNS Clothing Co. Pvt. Ltd. Is parent company of 3 leading ethnic wear brands, namely: W, Wishful and Aurelia with more than 300 outlets pan India and around 2000 touch points at various multi-brand outlets and key accounts (like: Shoppers Stop). It has also entered the international arena by opening stores in 2 countries, namely: Sri Lanka and Mauritius. TCNS has total retail manpower strength of more than 2000 employees working in these stores. Talking about W, it is the most successful ethnic wear brand of India leaving behind its major competitors like: Biba, Global Desi and Melange by Lifestyle.

With such a huge manpower plus retail outlet strength at W, arises the need of standardising each and every retail operation. Every process carried out in a retail store needs benchmarking so that every store manager and sales employee has a clear idea about how he / she is supposed to perform a particular task as per the standards.

From the past few years W has been growing rapidly and the entire concentration has been on increasing the sales volume and wider market penetration. Now that W has achieved that goal, the brand is now moving towards stabilizing along with growing to newer heights.

THE PROBLEM

Each and every “W” store whether owned by TCNS or franchise has a store manager. It is the sole responsibility of a store manager to make sure the store designated to him / her is a successful one.

Following are the major responsibilities of a store manager at “W”:

• To make sure every staff member is performing his / her task according to standards set by the company.

• The store’s physical appearance is as per standards set by the company.

• To make sure every customer is served well.

• To make sure the store is successful in terms of sales volume.

Apart from these responsibilities, a store has numerous tasks to be performed on a daily basis. Performing each one of them properly is a responsibility of the store manager, either directly or indirectly.

Though every store manager has been performing these tasks as per guidelines given to them by the company, still each one of them has a different and personalized approach towards performing all the store operations. These guidelines are not yet concrete and proper standards have still not been set. Hence, every store manager has been performing these tasks as per his / her own disposition, ignoring the fact whether his / her approach is correct and according to standards or not. Here arises the problem of evaluating which store manager’s approach is the best towards a particular task. One manager maybe good at performing a particular task, like visual merchandizing. The other maybe good at building a competent sales force in his / her store. Hence, the store operations may suffer from some drawbacks in spite of having some strength areas. This problem has come up due to the fact that there is still no benchmarking for the retail operations.