H&M in India: Realizing a global design concept
Vjmedia Works | October 19, 2015
H&M's first flagship store in India opens in full glory of its global store design concept. The store's stunning ambience and presentation has been achieved to offer customers the complete H&M experience at the prestigious South Delhi mall Select Citywalk, Saket. This was achieved with a combination of imported shop-fit material and local shop-build managed professionally by reputed agencies who complied with the global quality standards of H&M on-site in men, material and management. VM&RD gets a glimpse into what went behind the realization of a global store design concept in the Indian marketplace.

Their high fashion designs are presented in their stores with superb styling and visual merchandising in clusters of stylised mannequins that are highlighted boldly in the clean, chic and contemporary store environment providing a great environment for inspiring fashion shopping.

VM&RD chatted with Surajit Chaudhuri, Managing Director, Kalpakaaru Projects Pvt Ltd, the principal Indian agency behind the set- up of the H&M store. A veteran with over 20 years of experience in the shop fitting industry, he has delivering large format stores in India such as Marks & Spencer, Debenhams among other marquee brands.
Mock-shops were developed for approval of the H&M's build and construct teams at the Kalpakaaru manufacturing facility and engineering studio of 1,00,000 sq. ft. at Greater Noida to ensure the stringent expectation in quality of finishes were achieved. Having expertise in delivering retail stores for international brands of similar categories, Kalpakaaru could deliver the project successfully in about 16 weeks. The key requirement was of a robust project management systems that ensured compliance both with stringent H&M quality and specification deliverable and also with the norms and regulations required by local and mall authorities.
"The project apart from being monitored by multiple internal agencies on a daily basis and as mentioned earlier, incorporated the collaborative planning and lean build processes. This application was possible through the expert assistance of our UK based consultants along with the H&M team members. The synchronization and implementation of the above methodology ensured minimum wastage of the productivity in relation to the human resources on site apart from the materials consumed (on site raw material requirements) while realizing this store,†explained Surajit.

"We ensured both our procurement and on-site teams, which includes site engineering and build teams, followed strict compliance to the specification given by the brand and there was no compromise on deliverables,†affirmed Bobby Koothur, Executive Director, Kalpakaaru Projects Private Limited.
All the fit-out items like fixtures, lighting, flooring and visual merchandising elements were 100% imported by H&M from overseas and Kalpakaaru was assigned the responsibility of ensuring the management of the logistics and precise installation on site as per detailed drawing instructions from by Fitch Studio India. To enable the build and fit-out there were around 120 members from multiple agencies who helped deliver the fabulous store in 16 weeks.

H&M plans for its first couple of stores to have fixtures, store lighting systems and VM elements fully imported, to adhere to their international norms and standards, post which they will probably explore alternate agencies closer while the build and construct of the store would continue to be undertaken through their panel of reputed and professionally managed agencies.
H&M's is now planning its second store in the country slated to open in Delhi's Ambience mall, Vasant Kunj and the third in Bangalore.
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