Can It Be Shopper's-Cool-Stop Again?

The country's oldest department store chain turns 25 next year, but it may not be a birthday to remember unless it can catch up with the new world.

- Anjali Kapoor Gaba

“We Were Late To The Party And Suffered Because Of Technology failures,” says Govind Shrikhande, sipping masala chai at the Trident in Mumbai. “There’s another area where we messed up—we didn’t anticipate that private equity firms will bring billions of dollars to disrupt this industry.” You rarely expect a Fortune India 500 boss to admit to failure so readily. But Shrikhande, whose business card reads, “customer care associate and managing director, Shoppers Stop”, doesn’t shy away from describing his company’s attempts to cope with disruption as what they really were: disasters.

Like most pure-play brick-and-mortar retailers, Shoppers Stop, the country’s oldest department store chain founded in 1991, has seen e-commerce upstarts eat its lunch. Media reports published in October suggest that WS Retail, the largest seller on India’s No. 1 e-commerce marketplace Flipkart, crossed Rs 10,000 crore in turnover in FY15—overtaking the combined sales of Shoppers Stop, Future Lifestyle, Tata’s Trent, and Aditya Birla Group’s Pantaloons, which have been slow in responding to the onslaught. To compound matters, now there’s the threat of online incursion by global retail behemoths like Zara and H&M: Last month in a landmark decision, the government allowed single-brand retailers with foreign direct investment to open e-commerce operations in India.