Tata’s Westside to expand beauty offering with omni-channel approach

Tata Group’s department store chain Westside plans to focus on beauty and expand its cosmetics offering to fuel its next round of growth. The business is expanding its fragrance and skincare offerings and plans to bolster its e-commerce operations to capture more online customers. 

“To capture the beauty market, we’re investing in research and development, along with launching many new ranges,” said Trent Limited’s COO Shailina Parti, ET Retail reported. “We’ve gone into fragrance in a big way. We are also launching skincare. Our objective is to develop affordable quality products. So, we are building beauty and we see beauty very much in the forefront of our strategy.”
 
Run by Tata’s retail arm Trent, Westside opens an average of 30 new brick-and-mortar stores per year. As the business refurbishes a selection of its current stores, it will increase the in-store area dedicated to beauty and personal care products. Westside has refurbished approximately 15 to 20 of its 300 stores and plans to continue to revamp existing locations. 

“Westside.com has grown 150% on last year,” said Parti. “We want to further build our online proposition. Currently, e-commerce contributes ti 7% of our overall revenue and is profitable. There lies an opportunity to grow it by another 30% to 40% on the current base over the next two years.”