Footwear retailer Metro Brands witnessed strong growth in the third quarter backed by traction seen across multiple categories and cities.

The company said it has begun taking strategic price hikes of about 3 per cent in response to inflationary trends and only about 13 per cent of its portfolio was impacted by the recent change in good and services tax (GST) rate for footwear priced below ₹1000.

The leading specialty footwear retailer’s portfolio includes its own brands such as Mochi and Walkway and it also retails international brands such as Crocs.

Nissan Joseph, CEO, Metro Brands Ltd said, “We saw growth across all our four concepts of Metro, Mochi, Walkway and Crocs and across different geographies and channels in the third quarter. We are seeing continued double digit growth in the e-commerce business. If you look at our performance over the last 10 years, we have grown our sales at 16 per cent CAGR. While there are some headwinds, but we remain bullish.”

Joseph added that while casual footwear segment continued to witness growth in the third quarter, there was an uptick in demand for festival and weddings-related footwear segments.

“We even saw traction in the formal footwear segment. Our premium products of over ₹3,000 price category also saw strong growth,” he added. 

Replying to a query on the impact of the Omicron-induced restrictions, Joseph said, “We definitely do see the impact of those restrictions on business at our stores. The company has shown intense financial discipline and operational rigor to come out of the more severe national lockdown earlier. We continue to focus on being agile and ramping up omni-channel sales. But we remain hopeful, as countries that went through this ahead of us, have come out of it pretty quickly compared to the previous waves and have not seen severe hospitalisations.”

Impact of GST rate hike

He said that less than 13 per cent of the company’s inventory was impacted by the GST change and that the company has made the relevant price adjustments.

Talking about inflationary pressures, Joseph said, “We have started taking strategic price increases. We forecasted an overall hike in this quarter to next quarter by 3 per cent. Our value brands will see a bigger impact of maybe close to 8 per cent, while our core brands will probably see an impact of about 3 per cent.”

The company has added 65 new stores in this fiscal year so far and now operates 629 stores across the country.

“We continue to see strong opportunities for opening new stores across our brands whether it’s in the metros, tier-2 or tier-1 towns. We also see an opportunity for FitFlop to have its own standalone exclusive brand stores in the coming months.” The company recently inked a strategic partnership with international brand FlitFlop and has bagged exclusive rights to sell and distribute the brand in India.

 “Before the pandemic, e-commerce was a little over 2 per cent and today it is starting to cross double digits for us. So there has been a meteoric growth. We continue to make strong investments on the e-commerce channel,” he added.

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