Big Shoes To Fill

The challenge for the third generation of 70-year-old Metro Brands is clear-cut: To mimic the brick-and-mortar growth online

- Monica Bathija

Retail was probably the last thing Farah Malik Bhanji, a math major from University of Texas, Austin, envisioned herself doing. But when she worked at her family-owned multi-brand footwear retail firm Metro Shoes (now Metro Brands) for a couple of months in 1999, she got hooked and stayed. Farah, who started in the marketing department and moved on to product and concept development, was eventually appointed CEO and MD in 2013.

The second daughter of Rafique Malik, chairman of Metro Brands, like her four sisters, grew up listening to shop talk at the lunch table, sitting behind the cash counter of the Metro Shoes store in Colaba in Mumbai with their grandfather Malik Tejani, and later interning at the company. But it was never a given that any of them would join the company or, in case they did, that they would not have to work their way up like everyone else, says Malik, 68, who himself began working at his father’s store at 15 during his holidays.

Starting out in the ‘malia’ or loft, he worked his way up—or, perhaps in this case it should be that he worked his way ‘down’. And when he finally wanted to start his own store in 1969, Malik switched to morning college to keep in line with Tejani’s diktat that you could not have a store that was not owner-managed; and that you could not do retail if you were not in the shop 12 hours a day.