Lacoste to Make Online Channels More Robust Going Forward - Rajesh Jain, MD and CEO, Lacoste India

Lacoste to continue strengthening the omnichannel network. The brand aims to keep upgrading the boutiques to provide more premium experience to customers visiting the stores.

- Sandeep Kumar

Looking back, if you had to pen down your top 3 learnings from 2022, what would they be?

The year 2022 has been a milestone in the sense of decent recovery after a serious downturn due to the pandemic in 2020-21. Post lifting of lockdown, the comeback of customers to shopping, both online and offline, was initially considered by many as pent up demand/ revenge buying. However, if we look back, we would see that serious growth comes for 3-4 years after any such major downside. We can validate this with the growth seen after the downturn around 2001/2002, recession in 2007/2008 and a few other such events in the past few years.

2022 proved to be a live example where the history repeated itself. Most retailers, including us, saw decent growth in year 2022 and in my opinion, it was not driven by pent up demand or revenge buying alone.

The top three learnings from the year 2022 for Lacoste would be:

→Life comes in phases and as we witness some big incident that results in a major downtrend in retail industry and decent growth is followed after the event is over. Of course, the mantra is to stay afloat and sustain operations during the period of downward journey.

→ Fashion industry has always been a synonym for looking and feeling good & comfortable. Post Covid 19 and with development of technology, customers are now looking for convenience as well. Retailers need to be present where their target customer is present. Hence, it has become more important now to be present through multi channels; Online and Offline, EBOS & MBOS, travel retail and city retail, etc. and further enable capabilities of Omnichannel being Omnichannel platform supplement this multi-channel presence to ensure that the customers do not return back due to non availability of size, colour or a particular product.