Navjeevan Super Shop, which has been in business for over 70 years now, is widely regarded as the supermarket pioneer in north Maharashtra. Beginning its journey from a humble kirana store in Jalgaon in 1946, it opened its first self-service store in the city in 1993 and since then, it has taken impressive strides in modern food and grocery retailing. From 2007 onwards, Navjeevan has been on an expansion drive and opened five stores in quick succession. As of date, there are seven Navjeevan supermarkets in operation, all in Jalgaon, with a retail area spanning 21,000 square feet, which bring in a monthly revenue of about Rs. 5 crore.
How difficult and challenging was it to open and expand modern retail outlets in the backwaters of Maharashtra?
Initially, it was tedious and a somewhat difficult task to start and operate a modern day self-service retail shop in a city like Jalgaon. Getting access to funding resources was a problem. The cooperative banks here refused us the loan for the new store as they did not understand the concept of modern retail. Even we had our doubts then as to whether the customers would adapt to the new setting. As it were, our first super store in 1993 opened to a huge response from the public. But after the initial euphoria, sales plummeted and it took us two years to reach the break-even point. For the first two years of our supermarket operations, the sales were even less than the historical level of our old provision store (which closed after the opening of the new store), which had clocked annual sales of Rs. 10.8 million in the year 1992.
The less-than-expected sales forced us to deliberate on the issue. Till the time we had remained as traditional retailers, there was no visible competition. But after converting to the supermarket format, about 600 other traditional retailers in Jalgaon turned out to be our competition. This happened because the message that got conveyed to customers was that our new store was expensive because such a big set-up requires quite a large expense to maintain and run the operations. From whose pocket would Navjeevan earn it? For us, it took a lot of effort to break this pricey image of our store and reestablish the brand image as being pocket friendly to the customers.
A decline in sales for the newly opened Navjeevan supermarket must have been disheartening. What kept you going and retain your faith in modern trade?
This story is from the June 2018 edition of Progressive Grocer.
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This story is from the June 2018 edition of Progressive Grocer.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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