US co Foot Locker eyes desi feet

MUMBAI: At a time when it plans to shut operations in Asian markets like South Korea and parts of Europe, in line with its broader strategy to focus on core regions, American retailer Foot Locker is placing its bets on India.
The company, known for its wide collection of sneakers, is tapping into a market where the sneaker culture is yet expanding. Besides the big cohort of fashion-forward Gen Zs in India, now office goers and socialites have taken to pairing sneakers with their corporate and party outfits – something brands cannot overlook.
Mary Dillon, president and CEO at Foot Locker, said that India is the right place to be and that the country has the potential to become one of the brand’s key growth markets. “As we think about the next 50 years, I am being very careful, making sure we place our resources and efforts in the right places and we think India is one of those. It is an amazing country in so many ways. It’s the fifth largest consumer market in the world… we are always thinking about how to optimise… where do we feel confident that we can invest to grow, where can we get the scale,” Dillon told TOI in an interview.
Foot Locker – which has chalked out an omni-channel business model for India – has partnered with Metro Brands and Nykaa Fashion for its foray into the market, with its first store opening in Delhi over the weekend. While Metro Brands will manage the operations of its India stores, Nykaa Fashion will run the brand’s (standalone) online website along with launching a Foot Locker online store within the Nykaa Fashion app. “India, we think, is going to be a great growth market and by working with partners who really understand nuances of the market way better than we ever could, it gives us confidence that it is a smart way to approach a new market such as this,” Dillon said.

Foot Locker has some private label brands globally but they won’t be introduced in India as of now ; it also sells third-party brands like Nike, Adidas and Puma with the bulk of its business globally being driven by its partnership with Nike. Following Nike’s strategy to move away from wholesale partners and focus more on direct to consumer channels, its partnership with Foot Locker had been impacted but after taking over as CEO in September 2022, Dillon worked towards renewing the brand’s partnership with Nike. In India, all major global athletic footwear and apparel brands like Nike, Puma and Adidas operate and run stores but Foot Locker is betting on its store experience, brand storytelling and curated collection to get shoppers to its outlets. “We are the epicentre of sneaker culture globally and we bring together the experience in a way that I would say is pretty unparalleled. You can buy a lot of things in a lot of places but if you bring it together in a way that’s unique and really deeply connected to the mindset of the customer, we think it’s going to be quite differentiated,” Dillon said.
The Delhi outlet will be one of the brand’s new reinvented global store concept, internally dubbed as Foot Locker reimagined. It will be the brand’s first such store in Asia. Foot Locker’s India stores will feature sneaker, athletic footwear and apparel collection of 14 brands including Nike, Jordan, Adidas and Puma.
Nissan Joseph, CEO at Metro Brands said that the company’s investments will be more skewed towards Foot Locker than it does for its other brands like Mochi and Metro. “The opportunity for Foot Locker is quite intense in India and it has the legs to carry us forward where we would see returns on the investment along with the fact that we are doing a multi-channel launch,” Joseph said, adding that the idea is to open more stores this FY and gradually expand to most tier one cities. India’s footwear industry is pegged at $13 billion of which the market opportunity for athletic footwear and athleisure is estimated at $4.5 billion, said Joseph.
Sneakers and footwear are growing bigger than other categories in the online fashion space, said Adwaita Nayar, co-founder at Nykaa and CEO at Nykaa Fashion and through the partnership with Foot Locker, the brand hopes to get new customers. “We hope to give Foot Locker the benefit of our massive consumer base…25 million people have shopped with Nykaa (overall) till date,” said Nayar.