IndiaRetailBiz

Titan Industries, a Tata group watch and jewellery major, which recently forayed into prescription eyewear retailing business under the brand name of Titan Eye+, after a sluggish start has begun gathering steam.

Titan Eye+, according to agency reports, launched its new eye care products store at Kozhikode on Monday. This is Titan’s first Eye+ store in Kerala and fourteenth store in India. Spread over 1,100 sq ft, the Kozhikode Titan Eye+ store besides offering a world-class ambiance, stocks a wide range of eyewear products and accessories matching contemporary style and fashion. Like other Eye+ stores, this store also offers ‘end-to-end’ optical solutions to its customers.

The company, according to Bhaskar Bhat, its Managing Director, has shortlisted 40 towns where it will launch new Titan Eye+ stores in the next three months. Eventually, the company is looking at setting up 300 stores across the country in the next three years.

Titan Eye+ stores offer a large selection of spectacle frames, lenses, and a wide variety of eye care products. The company is targeting an annual turnover of Rs 450 crore ($125 million) over a period of the next five years.

Titan has roped in the services of Chennai-based “Sankara Nethralaya,” a famous eye care hospital, to impart training to its personnel.

The Rs. 1,800 crore prescription wear market, growing at about 15% per annum, is highly fragmented being almost entirely dominated by small retailers, has of late begun seeing emergence of corporate retail players. Only recently, Pearle Europe, a Dutch optical major in the continent, has formed a 50:50 joint venture with Reliance Retail to roll out a chain of optical and eye care stores across the country.