Alberto Torresi plans aggressive expansion, also aims to tap tier 2 cities

In an exclusive conversation with Ishaan Sachdeva, Director, Alberto Torresi, he highlights the growth story of the brand: Excerpt..

How has your brand evolved as a brand in India? What’s the y-o-y growth?

Providing a variety of categories in footwear range like boots, formals, loafers and slip ons to our customers has been our priority. Offering styles which are not easily available on other platforms, like the fishermen shoes, has always been our philosophy and the reason behind our growth. Also the introduction of various technologies into our product has led to the growth of the brand. In the past 6 years, we have introduced about 4-5 technologies like stress-less technology, impact system and memory technology to name a few.

We have witnessed an annual turnover of 15.35 Cr in the year 2013-14, 20.85 Cr in the year 2014-15 and 24.02 Cr in 2015-16.

Keeping in mind the growing customer preferences, what’s your Omni-channel strategy? Is booming e-commerce an opportunity? What’s your online pivot?

The main essence of the brand is to offer a lot of variety in terms of styles, designs and colors. So our strategy is to add more and more width. 60% of the styles will have the same core across all platforms but the remaining 40% will be customized to a particular channel. For instance, if you go online, you will find more and more casual stuff but if you go to distributive store, you will find more formal styles. Another strategy is aggressively priced range which is done to ensure our presence in different parts of the country as well as online. So one thing is variety and other is customization.

Coming to the e-commerce sector, e-commerce has added a lot of value to the entire Indian economy. That era has now passed when the offline business was affected by the online or vice versa. Rather now it is the time for collaboration between the offline and online. Now with the segregation of range according to the online and offline, the competition between the two has turned into complementation. Also e-commerce gives us an opportunity to connect with our customers directly. Recently, we have re-launched our website and through that we keep getting feedbacks about their choices and experiences which further help us to evolve.

What all innovations have been introduced by the company this year – in terms of design, customer loyalty, technology, among others.

Innovation has always ruled our collections. As mentioned earlier, we have introduced a strong technical backup into our products. Apart from this we have done a sweet hybrid of Italian and Indian footwear. Inspired by the Italian designs we have an entire range of classical footwear which have been modified according to the Indian preferences.

What all opportunities do you see going ahead?

Indian market in the long run has a huge scope. A lot of new things that have come up give huge impetus to the retailers. With the advent of GST, the market might slow down for a few months but with a period of time the booming of this sector will definitely happen. India as a market is evolving and people are more open to new things. Customers now like to experiment a lot. For instance there was a time when black color use to dominate the sales of the brand but now that has been over taken by tan. So the idea of experimentation gives us many opportunities of growth.

What’s going to be your future growth strategy?

Our strategy is to go achieve more point of sales in the country. We are coming up with our premium range which we had introduced sometime back as a trial. Our motive behind this was to do a research and then come up with the better version of it.We will also be coming up with a lot of new range in the coming seasons. On our website we have even started our exclusive collection section in which we offer products that are not available anywhere else. As a brand we want to connect to our customers more and more. Another strategy is to have more push on the offline as well as the online front. With the advent of so many ranges, we will be going into tier 2cities as well.