Croma eyes more stores

Croma, the consumer durables and infotech (CDIT) chain of Tatas, is getting into a new retail format to offer best-selling products from its stores. It also plans to set up shop-in-shops inside Star Bazaar, the hypermarket chain of group company Trent, to boost revenues.

The stores under the new format are called ‘Croma’ and will be of 4,500-6,000 sq ft in size. The chain already has Croma Megastore (8,000-12,000 sq ft) and Croma Zip (less than 3,000 sq ft). The chain plans to set up eight stores under the new format in the coming months, including three in Chandigarh, Panchkula and Mohali in two months. It already runs two such stores in Bangalore and Pune.

“We can not get 8,000 to 12,000 sq ft space in all cities and sometimes not sure about opening of malls, but we do not want to miss these localities. These stores have better per sq ft realisations. The initial stores are doing exceptionally well,” said Ajit Joshi, chief executive officer of Tata Sons-owned Infiniti Retail, which runs Croma stores.

It initially opened large stores of 20,000-22,000 sq ft on the lines of its Australian partner, Woolworths, which had a format, Power House. But later it came out with stores of smaller sizes.