People's person

Rajiv Chaudhary, CEO, Apeejay Oxford Bookstore, shares his experiences and knowledge in an interview to the Retailer

Retailer: What constitutes your professional profile?

Rajiv Chaudhary (RC): I started my career with Bata, which was then the only organised retail chain in the country. After working for five and half years, I worked with Shaw Wallace company as well as McDonalds’s. In 2003, I joined Apeejay Oxford Bookstore and have been here for last four years.

Retailer: When did you come to know about Apeejay Oxford Bookstore?

RC: Right from my childhood, I have always been interested in reading books especially novels and classics. Owing to my passion, I have been a regular visitor to the Oxford Bookstore and when this opportunity came, I thought that it serves the purpose of job and pleasure of reading for you get appealed and motivated when you sell books to people.

Retailer: As CEO, what is your responsibility and what has been your experience with the company? 

RC:  As a CEO, I am the business head of the company. Key objective of the company is profitability responsible for actually driving the company ahead. My experience here has been very exciting. When I joined the company, we had only three bookstores. Presently, the number of bookstores is seventeen and we are coming up with many new stores. What has been very exciting and passionate is that we are at no. 1 for while working on our business model, we are actually imparting knowledge to people, especially to children.

Retailer: Why did you opt for retail?

RC: In retail, you get to meet the customer directly and this is very exciting. You get customers of all shapes and sizes. At times, very knowledgeable people come in. Also, people come in just for casual browsing or coming with set objectives to buy. You get to identify and this is very exhilarating kind of situation. You are actually meeting the person, who is buying your product. APG group has promoters who are quite visionary kind of people. They felt the need to expand the chain and so, the chain has been growing. For me, it has been a very challenging task: identifying the location, trying to find out whether the location has potential or not and then setting up a store and making it run. Integrating or using latest technology into our system, necessary for setting up a world-class bookstore chain, has also been a challenging work.

 Retailer: How is the company facing market-competitions?

RC: As a company policy, we will be a bookstore-company only. Unlike other bookstore companies who offer related products, our strategy consists in having great, in-depth and wide range of products (books) for our customers. We don’t want to offer a usual kind of back sellers. We have a team that goes into great detail and research trying to find out good books for offering them to the public. 

Retailer: What are the promotional progrmmes used in promoting children bookstore Oxford Junior and Oxford Express?

RC: Basically, marketing strategies that we have adopted are heavily events in our store. We do lots of events in our stores where authors come and launch their books, authors coming in for book signing, book reading sessions. We are running clubs in our store - for instance, dialogue club, theatre group, film and photography club and writer’s club. We also do many interactive programmes for our customers and are indeed much more than a bookstore. We are one of the first bookstores in the country to have mobile help platform for our customers. If you SMS to 56365, you can get information like best selling books and locations of our store.

 Retailer: What has been your contribution to the company?

RC: My contribution has been at no.1 and I am a very people’s person.  Attracting many talents into the company so as to build a strong team is also what I have tried and done. Moreover, I have also been able to take forward the company from its earlier two or three stores to 17. We have actually managed to grow the business within the company.

Retailer: What is your word to young retail professionals?

RC: Well, I would say that ‘retail’ is exciting. It is a growing industry with lots of job opportunities for almost everyone. Youngsters need knowing that ‘it’s not just coming and enjoying in retail and trying to get money’ but it is also about hard works. Anybody willing to put in hard works and build a career in retail will definitely come out with flying colours.