The Rise Of Fashion Accessories In India

The fashion accessories category is the youngest of the lifestyle retail segments in modern retail in India. Though slow to take off, the latent potential and the various product category mixes that one can experiment with to create fresh new retail concepts makes it one of the most lucrative and interesting. Team Images BoF, takes a look...

- Shivam Gautom

With rapid urbanisation, media exposure, and our new belief in ‘Look Good, Feel Good’, the popularity of fashion accessories is now gaining unprecedented momentum. Overall, the Indian consumers has begun to set apart a special allocation for buying fashion accessories. This is a natural progression of fashion consumption sparked by amelioration of aspiration and lifestyle of the Indian consumer.

Market Size

In the last few years, the Indian retail scenario has gained unprecedented momentum owing to fantastic demographics, globalisation and liberalisation. As per the IMAGES Retail Report, the Indian retail market is expected to grow to about USD 950 billion from its current size of USD 600 billion by 2017-18. Within lifestyle retail, the apparel retail category, which is the most modernized of all retail sectors, is expected to grow from USD 50 billion in 2014 to USD 87 billion by 2017-18. The youngest of the lifestyle categories is the fashion accessories segment which has surfaced strongly in modern retail only in the last decade. This segment is expected to grow from its present size of USD 2.4 billion to USD 3.9 billion in the same period. However, we reiterate that contrasted to fashion retail, the fashion retail category is still dominated by the unorganised sector, with modern retail holding only 12 percent of it currently. This shows the immense potential this category holds for modern retail.