Liberty Shoes has been fashioning footwear for well over 65 years now, for the style-conscious people around the globe. From school shoes to sports shoes, from ballerinas to comfortable slips-ons, from corporate formals to relaxed casuals, the company provides the widest range of footwear options to the consumer. Besides footwear, the company also creates a range of accessories like shoe care products, back packs, belts, wallets, travel bags and handbags for women. In an interview with Fibre2Fashion, Liberty Shoes’ Director Anupam Bansal speaks about the Indian footwear market.
Has the preference of Indian consumers shifted from being price sensitive to fashion conscious?
Liberty has been one of the top Indian footwear brands since many years. We have always served a large proportion of the Indian population of all age groups. Our vision of creating shoes that are not only comfortable but also affordable has made us a popular brand among the masses. Meeting the needs and requirements of the whole family has been Liberty’s prime course of supply.
Over the course of time, the preference of customers has evolved as they have prioritised buying products that are not just affordable but also serve the need. Indian consumers have become extremely price sensitive, especially since the pandemic has struck. Keeping this in mind, Liberty ensures that our product-mix is focused on creating price sensitive and affordable shoes that are extremely comfortable and – of course – trendy.
In which regions do you plan to expand in the next 2-3 years?
Liberty has been one of the favourite brands of tier 2 and tier 3 cities of the North and South. We have focused in exerting our dominance in these cities and have been successful in our path. Currently, we plan to further grow Liberty and expand our brand in tier 2 and tier 3 cities of North and South India.
Which new product categories do you plan to introduce?
As of now, we are not looking at introducing any new product categories as such. Having said that, we are more focused and extremely motivated towards investing in our four brands – AHA, Lucy & Luke, Healers and Leap7x. We are actively working towards making these brands reach new milestones.
In order to reach that goal, our plan is to introduce new price points and more advanced technologies of these brands.
What is your USP?
Right from Liberty’s existence, comfort has always been our USP and our topmost priority. We take pride in always holding true to our tagline: ‘Comfort is Fashion’. To enhance the consumer’s comfort, we have been busy with investing in introducing new technologies to our production setups. We have also been investing our time, energy and will in design and development processes. Our ultimate goal is comfort of the consumer and we are diligently moving towards enhancing it further every day.
Have you made any changes to your retail business model post pandemic? Please share a few details.
Liberty was quick in adapting to the unfortunate circumstances after the pandemic struck the world. We wasted no time in doing a complete redo of our product-mix. We observed that with the coming of the COVID-19 pandemic, our Bin category (open/washable category) became top-selling. The increase in the sales of AHA became very prominent. Due to the fact that people started working from home, stopped going out for gatherings and had restricted outings during the pandemic, the rise in AHA was obvious and expected.
Adapting to this change, we reacted very quickly to the problem and revisited our product mix as well as our price mix. We took steps to immediately grow the depth and width of such fast moving categories by introducing new styles, new technologies and new collections, while at the same time ensuring that we keep the price brackets affordable.
What are the challenges that are exclusive to the footwear industry in India? How do you plan to overcome them?
Around 60 per cent of the Indian footwear industry is struggling because a large part of it is unorganised. The unorganised sector does not fear piracy, and its short-term goal-oriented approach creates a lot of turbulence in the organised setup.
Bringing technologies to the country, especially when our focus should be ‘Make in India’, is far from good. On the one hand, brands are trying their best to produce more within the country, while on the other hand, they are bringing technologies to the country from outside. This is creating a clash and proving to be disastrous for the footwear industry.
What is your share in the Indian footwear market?
Presently, a large proportion of the Indian footwear industry is unorganised. Talking about figures, the ratio of organised and unorganised proportions of the footwear industry in India is 20:80 respectively.
Considering this huge gap, it is evident that since majority of the footwear industry is unorganised, it gets tough to claim our share in the Indian footwear market. However, we have approximately three per cent share out of the 20 per cent of the organised business of the footwear industry in India.
Which are your best performing markets and best performing categories?
Liberty has been one of the favourite footwear brands of India for many decades. Presently, Liberty is successfully capturing the markets of tier 2 and tier 3 cities of the North. In the south, Karnataka, to be precise, is the topmost buyer of Liberty.
We encompass several brands within Liberty, all of them doing well in providing their consumers with suitable, comfortable, stylish and affordable footwear. However, with athleisure style dominating the markets these days, Leap7x – our athleisure brand for men, women and kids – has been doing extremely well in the recent past.
What new footwear technologies and innovations do you plan to invest in the near future?
One of our top performing brands is Healers. The brand is based on enriching the comfort of the consumer by constructing the footwear with latest comfort technologies like H, H1, Hm, H4, HA and H8 technology. These technologies are primarily designed to provide stimulation to specific nerves and major pressure points. Healers are specially crafted to stimulate these definite points in order to improve the blood circulation of the wearer for specific body parts and increase the flow of the blood to these areas. We are actively planning to extend our efforts, designs, developments and technologies in the same category. Planning to invest in enhancing H-H8 technology of Healers, we are sure to come up with new innovations and expand the brand with flying colours.
What is the fiscal growth of Liberty in the last year? What is the expected growth for the next 2-3 years?
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the markets and economy have not been the same as the pre-pandemic world. After the pandemic struck, we went through a dip in sales. The retail industry sales were the most affected by the pandemic. Liberty, being in the retail sector, experienced a significant drop in sales.
But we were quick to control the situation and today we are at 30 per cent of annual growth rate. At present, we are trying to maintain this tempo and in the upcoming 2-3 years, we plan to grow further and boost this percentage higher.
Published on: 18/05/2022
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
