Small Is Still Beautiful

Neighbourhood kirana owners are sprucing up their stores and joining hands with big retailers to meet India’s insatiable appetite for shopping. And consumers are not complaining.

- Arnika Thakur

It’s a hot and humid tuesday afternoon. One would assume there wouldn’t be too many people out shopping. But Delhi is different. Modern Bazaar in the basement of Select Citywalk, one of the city’s busiest malls, is abuzz with activity. The outlet, the grocery chain’s third store, was set up by Kunaal Kumar in 2011. Later he opened the spruced-up version in the basement with an investment of 5-6 crore. The genesis of the business dates back to 1971 when Kumar’s father set up the store in Delhi’s tony Vasant Vihar neighbourhood. It soon expanded into a four-floor emporium and ran successfully for three decades before it was gutted in a fire in 2004. Kumar, who joined his father in 1991, decided to start afresh; he set up the store again in the same market with a capital of 40 lakh—some of which was his own money and the rest was borrowed from friends. “Business was thriving. I was able to pay back my friends within six months,” he says. So what brought about Modern Bazaar’s transformation from a small department store to a modern retail chain? Kumar’s forward-thinking strategy.

Modern Bazaar was never a typical neighbourhood store; it was always fancy with some imported products to tickle the taste buds of Delhi’s elite and moneyed class—Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan and former Congress president Sonia Gandhi have been famous patrons. The store is a great example of how modernisation and knowing the pulse of the consumer helped it nurture a single store into a full-fledged chain. It has 10 stores and now competes with biggies from the retail world such as the Future Group’s Big Bazaar and Foodhall, and Nature’s Basket, at least in Delhi and Gurugram.