ReportOnStore visit to

Lifestyle Store, High Street PhoenixLower Parel, Mumbai

Lifestyle Departmental StoreLifestyle Departmental stores started its journey in India with the launch of its first Lifestyle store in Chennai in 1999. Today it has evolved as India's leading shopping destination synonymous with fashion and gracious living. Each Lifestyle store brings together five concepts under one roof Apparel, Footwear, Children, Homecare & Furnishing and Beauty & accessories, offering a convenient one-stop shop for customers. Present across major metros in India, Lifestyle is rapidly expanding its footprint across the country.

In the year 2005, Lifestyle launched its first specialized, stand-alone home improvement store Home Centre. Home Centre is a one stop destination for furniture, homeware and soft furnishing that truly represents style, comfort and individuality. The stores use unique 'concept' rooms as the display model, to give consumers a practical idea of how each piece of furniture would look in a particular room.

In keeping with the tradition of making every shopping experience even more rewarding and memorable, Lifestyle introduced membership to the most privileged shopping circle in the country The Inner Circle. As a privileged member, every shopper gets to enjoy exclusive benefits and privileges such as reward points and exciting offers. The Inner Circle is today recognized amongst the leading Loyalty Program in the country with an ever increasing base of customers. The card is accepted across all Landmark Group Stores in India including Lifestyle, Home Centre, Max Fashion, Splash, Bossini, Auchaan Hypermarket, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts & Gloria Jean's Coffees.Lifestyle Store, High Street PhoenixLower Parel, MumbaiLifestyle Departmental store at lower parel has majorly 4 Concepts, namely1. Life Style Concept2. Mens wear Concept3. Ladies Western & Ethnic wear Concept4. Shoe Mart ConceptEach of the Concepts has a CM (Concept Manager) and an ACM (Assistant Concept Manager)Retail Selling Skills

Day 1: Role of a sales person and parameters of personal skillsWe reached the store at 2pm and each one of us was allotted a single concept to observe. On the Ground floor (Lifestyle concept, women western wear and bags section) We learnt about various brands like 109F, CODE(Private label), Van Heusen, ONLY, Allen Solly, Ginger(Private label), UCLA(Private label), Kappa(Private label), Levis, Lee, Bossini(Private label), UCB, Vero Moda, Fame Forever(Private label), AND.

On the 1st floor, the complete floor is dedicated to Mens apparel. It has some renowned brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Jack & Jones, Being Human, Arrow Sports, US Polo and various in-house brands.

On the 2nd Floor(women western wear, Shoe Mart Concept and Kids section)Shoe Mart is one concept which includes Footwear, Bags and Wallets. It is the most labor intensive floor space.

Ground floor has 5 cash counters. Only 3 are open on weekdays and all 5 are open on weekends. Rest of the floors has 4 cash counters. Only 2 are open on weekdays and all 4 are open on weekends. Every brand has mannequins placed, dressed in the theme of the season as every private label has themes for every season. Ginger has their current theme as Tropical welcoming their latest summer collection. There were 2 kinds of Sales persons,1. Lifestyle Sales Person2. Other Brands Sales Person We found Lifestyle Employees to be very helpful and very kind to customers as they goal is customer service and not just sales. Every Morning Concept Manager takes a meeting of employees under his concept and boost up their motivation for the new day. Lifestyle employees get a combined target of sales that needs to be done every month.Day 2: Become familiar with the sales process & Standard operating procedures Lifestyle sales person always follow the Palnogram for displaying the merchandise.

Every Merchandise is placed as per Range plan and Palnogram shown in the picture. This planograms are prepared at the head office in bangaluru.

Every day Business Manager browse through the whole store to verify whether merchandise is in place or not as per Planogram.

Gandola Hanging Display is another form of display other than wall display.

Every day Inward and outward processes takes place in the morning.

Every morning there should be 3 people present to open the store, namely1. Store Manager2. Security Head3. Inventory Manager. Inward Process is done to replenish the stock every day.

Outward is done to remove old stock.STL(Stock Transfer List) is verified on any inward and outward.

Seal in the inventory van has a seal number which is informed to the store manager beforehand in order to cross check the seal.

Seal is broken only when all the three people are there. A new seal is put by the inventory manager on the van after loading the outward inventory.

Following is the hierarchy of employees in a particular Concept. Similarly followed in other concepts.The store manager, store VM and HR all report to the Business manager.Every sales person at lifestyle follows the policy of Greet Smile and Thank (GST) the customer.

Day 3- Experiencing handling customers

I was posted to Shoe Mart concept for experiencing customers and what I found was that Footwear is the most labor intensive section in the whole Lifestyle.Since every wall display has only 1 shoe of the pair displayed, it is very critical to get the other shoe of the same pair in no time so as to retain customer till he/she buys it.The most important part of the shoe mart concept is its back operations (Inventory room) where stock is kept as per the style code of the pair of footwear. Every brand is alotted a separate rag where they can stock their goods.

I entertained few customers who were not clear as to what exactly they want to buy. Such customers are like cash cows to which you can sell anything with your good marketing skills.

I came across few incidences where in because of the delay in getting the goods from the inventory room, customers stroll away.

Customers try different brands to gauge comfort.

There is a specific peculiar sign that determines genuine leather.

Few customers also asked for home delivery for a pair of footwear when there was size availability problem.

There are few Private label brands of Lifestyle such as Paprica(Ladies), Juniors (For kinds), FORCA,Ginger (Ladies).

Day 4- Understanding the importance of customer service and challenges faced by a retail sales team.

For us Customer is a King- Pravin kumar (Employee of lifestyle)With this note, Lifestyle has trained their employees to treat customers like a King, and provide them with ultimate customer experience.While other brands stuff struggles to achieve their sales target, Lifestyle stuff concentrates on customer service. They believe customer service will eventually lead to sales.

Lifestyle also runs a loyalty program called InCircle which has nearly 9 lakh people data which can be used later for data mining and promotions. 60% of customers who shop at lifestyle are loyalty card holders and 40% non-loyalty card holders. This makes customer relationship extremely crucial for lifestyle. Saturday and Sunday amounts to 50% of the sales of the week.On the last day we also observed how the stock take is done and stock is outward with the help of PDT scanner which helps in making a report of the stock to be outward.

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