The making of India’s retail king

Kishore Biyani could have stayed in his father's firm, continuing the family's safe way of doing business, but the risk-taker dreamt of other ventures. In less than three decades, he has gone from family employee to head of India's largest retail conglomerate.  His company, Pantaloon Retail, has roughly 1,000 stores across the country and had 47 billion rupees (Dh3.75bn) in sales last year. That success made Mr Biyani the main attraction. His peers at the National Retail Federation crowned him retailer of the year. The Indian press has called him the king of retail. When Mr Biyani went into business, few thought his venture would survive, he says. He wasn't backed by a family corporation, and peers dismissed him as a compulsive risk-taker.

 

Mr Biyani who grew up in Mumbai's Malabar Hill area, was not born into old money. But his middle-class family was anchored by a line of businessmen, starting with his grandfather, who moved to Mumbai from Nimbi, a village in Rajasthan, to open a wholesale shop selling dhotis and saris. When Mr Biyani visited Mumbai's Century Bazaar as a teenager, he saw retailing being conducted on an immense scale. He decided then that he would create something similar - but better, he says.

 

Mr Biyani's first venture on his own came about by a fluke. It was the early 1980s, and he noticed that his friends were wearing trousers made of "stonewashed" fabric, a popular material at the time. In the next six months, he found a local mill that made the fabric and sold a few hundred thousand rupees worth of the material to a few garment manufacturers and shops in the city - giving him his first profit and his first taste of entrepreneurial success.

 

He then launched his own brand of fabric for men's trousers. He called it WBB - white, brown and blue. When demand for the fabric was at its peak, In 1987, Mr Biyani started a new company, a garment manufacturer called Menz Wear Private Ltd. The garments were sold under the brand Pantaloon, which Mr Biyani chose because it had the trendy feel of an Italian fashion house but was close to the Urdu word for trousers, patloon. The first Big Bazaar was opened in Kolkata in 2001. Within 22 days, he opened two more. Now there are 100 throughout India serving about 2 million customers a week. Part of Mr Biyani's success, he wrote in his book, is attributable to luck - being in the right business at the right time, in the right country.

 

Today the Future Group Chairman Kishore Biyani is determined to prove to the world that life goes on even without foreign direct investment (FDI). The retail pioneer has announced his newest business initiative, Big Bazaar Direct, with a teaser campaign that says, "1 Lakh Outlets, Zero FDI. The Future of FDI is Coming Soon".