Jockey India is focussing on expanding its offline footprint though the brand's online sales saw 3X growth during the pandemic

While VS Ganesh, CEO and Executive Director, Page Industries (exclusive licensee of Jockey in India), expects online to remain an important channel for the brand, he said the growth in revenue contribution of online sales during the pandemic might be a bit exaggerated because revenue from other sources shrunk during the period.

According to Ganesh, once the sale normalises, the share of online sales might stabilise at 2X of pre-pandemic figure because of the overall growth in revenue. Jockey India has opened its 1,000th store in Visakhapatnam, highlighting the brand's increased focus on expanding its traditional retail network across both urban and rural markets.

“We will be aggressively adding more stores because there is room for growth, urbanisation is happening so rapidly and the consumers prefer to have stores near them, so we are trying to be closer to the consumer. We are focusing on how quickly we can achieve the 2,000 stores mark,” Ganesh told BusinessLine .

Jockey has also opened a good percentage of multi-brand outlets (MBOs) in Tier-3 and Tier-4 cities. This expansion is said to have helped the company to continue serving its existing customers as they migrated to the countryside after the pandemic, along with acquiring new customers. In fact, the tier-3 and -4 market is said to be very encouraging for the company both in the online as well as brick and mortar channel.

Even during the pandemic, the company has added over 15,000 multi-brand outlets (MBOs) and about 350 EBOs (exclusive brand outlets). Given that Jockey’s products are essential products, the company did not see a significant loss in demand during the past year. It was only during the complete lockdowns that the brand was affected but was able to recover once the lockdown curbs were eased and its stores saw a surge in demand.

“We are overwhelmed by the demand. In fact, today we are working very hard on the supply chain side to catch up with the market demand. We are rapidly increasing our footprint when it comes to outsourcing, adding more vendor partners so that we can quickly scale up and meet the requirements of our customers,” said Ganesh.

Jockey entered the India market in 1994 under an exclusive partnership with Page Industries Ltd. The first store which was opened in Commercial Street and still stands there, and the franchisee partner of the first Jockey India store has grown to own a total of eight stores.

Jockey was the first brand to move innerwear from the storeroom to the storefront in the country hence gradually changing consumer perception and approach towards shopping for innerwear. Jockey’s portfolio includes a wide range of athleisure, thermals, socks with the latest addition of masks, caps and handkerchiefs.

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