DUBAI: The upscale jewellery retailer Damas has renewed its relationship with India’s Titan by which the latter’s hugely popular Tanishq range of branded jewellery will be reintroduced into these markets. The announcement comes perfectly timed ahead of the buying spike expected in the days leading up to the Indian festival of Diwali on October 23.
The Tanishq range will be suitably showcased at the Damas stores which have traditionally seen a higher representation of buyers from the Subcontinent. Titan, part of the Tata Group, started off with watches and have now extended its portfolio to other lifestyle accessories, apart from jewellery. In India, the Tanishq network of more than 160 outlets covers as many as 90 cities.
“The target with this collection is clearly the Asian clientele and that means a presence at Damas stores in the UAE and beyond,” said Anan Fakhreddin, CEO at Damas. “Right now what we have is a distribution arrangement with Titan for its collections and not a joint venture in any form. The current deal also does not cover any selling of Damas collections through Tanishq stores in India. Right now the focus is strictly on what can be done for the brand in the Gulf.”
This represents a reacquainting of sorts for the two entities. In the past, Damas used to buy the Tanishq range and sell jewellery pieces through its stores. This continued until 2008-09, following which the arrangements were overtaken by the global crisis and the changes that Damas itself went through.
“The Tanishq range will be benchmarked with the prevailing prices in Dubai/Gulf,” said Fakhreddin. “It’s too early to say whether the range will be widened — for that we will go by the initial reaction from the target buyer base. But there’s no denying that Tanishq enjoys a rare affinity with Indian jewellery shoppers and there’s a lot of shared valued that it enjoys with Damas.” The distribution arrangement does not apply to the ‘Titan’ branded watches.
Of late, Damas — owned by Qatar’s Mannai Corp. — has been pushing its own range of branded collections into the marketplace and aiming for a higher pricing point while doing so. It also went through some network consolidation in the process.
But, now, the accent is very much back on expansion mode. Since January, 18 locations were opened and more are on the way. Saudi Arabia — where it has 20 odd outlets — will continue to garner many of the new openings. “There’s still a huge gap there between what the existing presence gives us and what we can do,” the CEO added, but declined to get into any projections on the retailer’s full-year top-line numbers.
