Visual Merchandising and Retail Design – July 2019

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Raymond and the complete retail

journey

To begin with, can you tell us about
the progress made through TRS’ (The
Raymond Shop) retail journey under
your mentorship?

My role is to imbibe the essence of
#CustomerFirst, in other words ‘keeping
customer at the heart of everything’

that we do at retail. We are building
the Raymond store on 3 pillars: First is
customer connect and customer trust
in the brand. Second is the consistent
desire to be the best in class in terms of

the products and services.. The third pillar
is the success of our channel partners,
which is mainly a franchise-led network.

Iconic retail brand Raymond introduced its mini store format, Mini TRS (The Raymond Shop), in 2017, specially
targeting tier-III and tier-IV towns. VM&RD had reached out to Mohit Dhanjal - Director-Retail, Raymond, last year to

get the company’s views on the brand’s new retail format. A year later we reach out to him again to get some fresh
perspectives on the brand’s retail journey and the factors that contributed to the success of the Mini TRS within a
short span of time.

Mohit Dhanjal, Director-Retail,

Raymond

Retail Talk

The team took the challenge of opening

300 stores in two years, while our past

annual average was only 25 stores.

The team worked round the clock and

turned that challenge into the positive

opportunity through relentless passion

and grit.

When did the need for Mini TRS arise and

how did you tap into the opportunity?

With urbanization, the emergence of over

1200 new urban towns, having population

of over 50k, showed a lot of potential

for The Raymond Shop (TRS). Having

its presence in over 400 of these towns,

Raymond felt a need to evolve and develop

new retail business models with the right

consumer proposition for the remaining

800 potential towns.

Based on its 60 years of experience in retail

and an in-depth study of over 100 outlets

in tier IV & V markets; Raymond piloted a

new business model in September 2016

internally referred to as Mini TRS (The

Raymond Shop) which was then perfected

over 6 months and commercially launched

in March 2017. The first Mini TRS opened on

25th March in Bihta (Bihar). Since then, over

303 Mini TRS’s have been rolled out in the

past 24 months making The Raymond Shop

the leading brand in men’s fashion lifestyle

with roaring presence across 590+ towns

July 2019