In Indian Retail, Speed Isn’t an Advantage. It’s the Entire Strategy.
Why Fast Brands Win Before Slow Ones Finish Planning
If there had been a conversation about ‘The Bests Of 2025’, I would personally vote for mine to be the moment when Shubhanshu Shukla became the first Indian ever to reach the International Space Station.
Speaking of *ahem ahem* soaring heights *ahem ahem*, the TATA-owned fashion brand Zudio isn’t too far behind (I apologise for the simile, but it was too funny not to use it here).
At the start of this year, Zudio unveiled its incredibly bold plan to open a store every 3 days, and it paid off. Zudio finally crossed the revenue milestone of $1+bn in FY25.
Pace = Brand Strategy
Watching a massive hole being blown right through the Affordable Fashion sector in India, another Indian conglomerate, Aditya Birla Group, launched its own fashion brand, OWND!. Exactly like Zudio, their brand strategy would essentially be their pricing strategy, and again, like Zudio, they’re planning to open ~400 stores in the next 3-5 years.
Zudio should rightfully be given the title of a fashion-disruptor, but this conversation isn’t really about that. A cornerstone of Zudio’s strategy is to flood the tier-2 and 3 markets, which have historically been overlooked, with aggressive expansion. It’s their retail rollout speed that makes them, well, them, and why other brands can’t really figure out exactly that.
The gap no one notices
Let’s leave the above-mentioned ambitious retail expansion examples alone for a moment. Instead, let’s take a look at a business that has identified potential in, let’s say, 3 locations, and approved the design for all 3 places. But the thing in retail is, approval is often mistaken for momentum.
There is an assumption that spreads across the ranks, the assumption of “everything is approved, hence everything is planned”, which isn’t exactly well-founded. Procurement often goes unnoticed, from one phase to another, which disrupts the bottom line.
A normal business would probably blame governance, compliance, or slow approvals, and front the cost in the hopes that they will break even once the store starts functioning, but if you scale it to hundreds of stores, the cost grows exponentially.
How faster brands think about procurement
In the grander scheme of things, I want to make a distinction; a distinction between the two different types of brands. The first kind treats procurement as a downstream function that happens at a particular time, and the other looks at all the stages through the lens of procurement. They involve it early - not to control creativity, but to protect execution.
What they do is:
- Streamlined workflows
While the uninitiated quickly jump to label structured and streamlined processes as ‘corporate’, it is exactly these systems of - where every role, step, and condition is predefined - that reduce the procurement turnaround time.
- Agile procurement
What separates a good procurement system from the rest is the brand’s ability to not look at the entire mountain at once, but go through each shorter step one-by-one. They break the long, linear cycles into their formative components - sourcing, negotiation, onboarding - and work on them in parallel, rather than in sequence.
- Cross-team collaboration
Instead of considering procurement as its own stage, where the team goes over the finance, legal, or compliance aspect at a particular time and potentially requests rework, brands embed the procurement stakeholders into the planning and design phase itself, which happens much early during the retail expansion campaign, as it shortens approval times.
Anmol Dham is a Content Strategist at D’Art Design, where he crafts meaningful narratives that elevate brand experiences and spotlight design thinking.
Known for his curious mindset and a keen eye for detail, he delves into topics others often overlook, and brings fresh perspectives that are backed with solid strategy and analytics.
and new opportunities in the retail world.