Yamaha Music

Transforming Yamaha’s Retail Presence for a Make-in-India Future

Yamaha, a brand that has proud Japanese roots, is at a crossroads. There is a growing sentiment of national pride, which is pushing the narrative of ‘Make in India’ for Indian brands.

Indian brands are reciprocating this sentiment by ‘upping’ their quality to counter foreign alternatives, resulting in aspirational Indian Brands being born.

Parallelly, there is a resurging self-expression movement that is being seen in the under-25 cohort, with music taking the centre stage as the preferred medium. This has caused the Indian musical instruments industry to grow at a 12.4% CAGR, reaching a valuation of $161mn in 2025.

For Yamaha, a brand that had already invested in India by opening up a manufacturing facility in Chennai back in 2019, it was a chance to further align itself with the ‘swadeshi’ movement by revamping its visibility in retail environments.

The Insight

Since the majority of the music stores in India are essentially family-owned MBOs, Yamaha wanted to revamp their in-store retail presence to boost the desirability of their products further.

D’Art began with an expansive retail audit, taking the assistance of their research and planning verticals, and landed on a key insight - they realised that almost 90% of the stores dealing in musical instruments cram repair, sale & purchase, and billing into a single space. Basically, they found music stores to be cluttered, chaotic, and overwhelming.

This was crucial for a customer, who usually belonged to 1 of 2 demographic groups (struggling artists and music aspirants), as their in–store experience was disrupted. Lack of planogramming and a compromised walkway resulted in the product being lost somewhere in the noise.

For D’Art, however, it was an opportunity. They weren’t focusing on simply decluttering the space, but elevating Yamaha Music’s brand presence by revamping the visual, functional, and spatial rationale.

Our Realisation

Post the aforementioned audit, D’Art began researching the music ecosystem in India - the way store sizes, fixtures, customers, and their preferences dictate the market - to try and find a moat that would help Yamaha stand apart from its competitors. D’Art also worked on identifying the usable space within partner stores and understanding how consumers plan their route and engage with those products.

While Yamaha’s fixtures were supposed to be in line with their global identity, D’Art drew inspiration from India’s heritage to design a fixture that wasn’t just made in India, but Made For India. The fixtures were also tasked with uplifting the products to a higher standard of quality.

Thus, iron structures were used to hint at strength, durability, and premiumness in the products. These fixtures were supposed to be placed in curated product zones, a planned space within the clutter, that acted as a magnet. This helped boost product visibility and dwell time, which translated into higher consideration. 

From strategy to design and execution, D’Art acted as an end-to-end retail expansion partner to ensure that the vision they had for Yamaha was consistently scaled across every store, irrespective of their locality or size.