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Its streets may not be gilded but certainly its sidewalks are home to glittering palaces of gold and silver.
Welcome to Chennai’s T Nagar, synonymous with shopping for jewellery and clothes.
Cheek by jowl in most roads and lanes in this area are close to a hundred small and big jewellery stores occupying over half a million sq ft of shop space.
And a new one is coming up every other day though not all are on such scale as the Kalyan Jewellers’ store.
A television commercial shows a host of film stars, including the Big B and Kannada actor Shiva Rajkumar, all clad in traditional dhoti and shirt with ‘ angavastram ’ draped over their shoulders, getting ready to announce the launch of the store at T Nagar. The promoters have managed to create a hype not commonly associated with the opening of a jewellery retail outlet. “Why not?” asks TS Kalyanaraman, CMD of the company. “After all, spread across 40,000 sq ft, this will be the world’s biggest gold jewellery retail outlet.”
For reasons ranging from being the ‘biggest traditional retail hub’ to simply ‘a well-connected pocket’, jewellers have gravitated to T Nagar over the years. The ‘golden zone’, as described by N Ananthapadmanabhan, Regional Chairman of All India Gems and Jewellery Trade Federation, and Managing Director of NAC Jewellers, sells close to 150 tonnes of gold every year, a whopping ₹40,000-crore business, according to jewellery retailers.
NAC Jewellers, which has a 15,000 sq ft showroom here, plans to add another 5,000 sq ft by acquiring an adjacent building. GR Thangamaligai, popularly called GRT, has three showrooms taking up over 50,000 sq ft on this stretch. Joy Alukkas has a 30,000 sq ft store. Be it Tanishq, Malabar Gold, Lalitha, Prince, LKS Gold House, Sri Kumaran, Saravanas, Vummidiars, or Nalli, all of them have their biggest stores in T Nagar.
“Be it the sheer volume of sales or the number of stores, T Nagar may well be the world’s biggest cluster of gold jewellery retailers,” says Sandeep Kulhalli, Vice-President (Retail and Marketing), Tanishq, which has its biggest store in Mumbai.
Though Mumbai’s Zaveri Bazaar is the oldest cluster of gold and diamond jewellery trade, it is predominantly a wholesale market, says Ananthapadmanabhan of All India Gems and Jewellery Trade Federation.
A Shankar, National Director of Jones Lang LaSalle, a leading commercial real estate service provider, says that in Zaveri Bazaar, about 200 stores jostle for space but most of them are B2B outlets. Further, 90 per cent of them are small format stores, occupying less than 1,000 sq ft. “Put together, all these shops would run up to 1 lakh sq ft,” he says.
According to Shankar, Kochi’s MG Road, another gold retail hub, has about 20 large format stores totalling around three lakh sq ft.
Turning to Chennai’s gold souk, he says, thanks to its accessibility and the fact that the area caters to everything from footwear to diamond necklace, T Nagar has become a weekend destination for shoppers, and thus the first choice for retailers. Quoting a JLL study on T Nagar, he says over a lakh of people use the city bus terminus here every day; for most part of the year, the roads are choked with vehicles with the volume of traffic several times the roads’ carrying capacity. Quoting other studies, a realtor says at least two lakh people visit this commercial hub during weekends and the numbers swell to over a million during festival/marriage seasons.
This has a cascading effect on realty prices. Limited supply of land and the huge demand for commercial space have led to prices rocketing. Rentals hover around ₹150 per sq ft in the half-a-km radius.
Though the guideline value is around ₹3 crore per ground (2400 sq ft), land parcels change hands at many times this price. “On an average, a ground sells at ₹10 crore,” he says.
Notwithstanding the land cost or rentals, “we are getting a lot of enquiries from jewellery retailers,” says JLL’s Shankar.
Market sources say another leading jewellery retailer Chemmanur Jewellers is looking for space in T Nagar for its flagship store.
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