Failure of Big Bazar

by- lakshay chawla

 Big Bazaar - Startup Story

• Kishore Biyani, the owner of Big Bazaar, had big dreams for his business as he was from a
business family. Biyani's grandfather owned a clothing business, which is why Kishore was into the
business from a very early age, as was his family, all involved in their clothing business. However,
what separated Biyani from the other members of his family was his big dream of doing something
unique, for himself and others.  This is what led him to design a retail store that would have
everything under one roof. Big Bazaar resulted from his brainstorming, dedication, and hard work.
Biyani had already made Pantaloons a big hit as a fashion and retail store since he founded it in
1997. Now, after Big Bazaar was founded in 2001, he took the retail industry by storm.
 OPENING OF FIRST STORE

• He opened his first departmental store in Kolkata, after renting and

converting the place into a 10,000 square feet store, which was twice the
size of any store in Kolkata back then. Within the next 22 days, he opened
more than 2 more stores in the city, and within a year, Biyani successfully
opened over 50 stores all across the country. Big Bazaar started spreading
across the country, and with the warm reception that the brand has seen,
Biyani's Big Bazaar stores surpassed the 100-mark by 2009.
 Big Bazaar - Business Model

• Big Bazaar operates on a B2C business model. It offers numerous products on a single platform
to its consumers. It is considered to be one of the largest departmental stores in India. The
company provides awesome discounts and offers to the customers. This is the only factor that
attracts all sorts of people to Big Bazaar. Products like home and furniture, electronics, jewelry,
toys, sporting and fitness, grocery, clothing, movie and music, footwear, craft and party supplies,
stationery, kitchen appliances, etc., can all be found under one roof. This is the specialty. The
principle of the company is - low margin and high turnover. This is the only reason behind finding
offers every time in the stores.  
 Big Bazaar - Growth

Being one of the oldest and largest chain of retail stores, Big Bazaar has been ailed for its
wide variety of quality products at affordable prices. Founded in 2001, when Big Bazaar's
popularity started to catapult, the retail stores have also claimed to have served over 2
million customers each week. It has been also said that more than 300 million customers
visited and revisited Big Bazaar in a year. However, since 2017, Big Bazaar's struggle
against debts became prominent, and by 2019, many of its stores were closed down. The
pandemic outbreak happened in 2020, which wiped away even the sales that Big Bazaar
was seeing. This led Future Group to sell Big Bazaar to Reliance Industries. It has previously
missed lease payments to Reliance also, which was apparent as its website was also down.
 Big Bazaar - Future Plans

• Big Bazaar has earlier mentioned its potential expansion in the tier-II cities of India,

especially which are less impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and had got greater
aspirations. However, we are here now with most of the Big Bazaar stores closed,
overlooking none less than a miracle after the calling off of the Reliance and Future
Group deal. Whether Big Bazaar will be concentrating more on the expansion
strategy, or merging with any other companies is still undisclosed, but the Kishore
Biyani-founded company cannot simply sustain the losses they have witnessed.
 What happened to Big Bazaar why Big
Bazaar failed?

• Big Bazaar was in debt and could not afford to pay off loans to lenders well in time. The
condition was not good sincein 2017. In 2019 most of the store were closed due to
Pandemic and sale was dropped, which further worsen the condition of the Big Bazaar in
totality the condition of Future group. As the sales revenue and cash flow was at bottom the
cost of operation was rising and accumulation of overhead expenditure was at peak. Due to
which the condition of the organisation become worst. Big Bazaar crisis started way back
in 2017 but due to unavoidable situation of Pandemic, lockdown took it to bottom.
 Why big bazar failed
• The question is being a leading retailer of the country and with so many business
vertical why the Future group failed? Why Big Bazaar failed? Was Big Bazaar
not in a profit?

• When any retailer sales the mix product assortment like food, grocery, fashion,
home merchandice the gross margin is always better. It may be possible that all
the Big Bazaar store may not be in profit. But there seems to be several other
reasons which seems to be responsible for the failure of Big Bazaar. These is
just an unbiased opinion base on the media news and blogs.
 Reasons for big bazar failures
1.Uncontrolled expnasion of the formats, heavy investment on the formats like Easy day, heritage
etc.

2.Marketing cost was high, do you remmber IPL, Femina Miss India, all such activity cost a lot.

3.Big Bazaar, Easy Day, FBB all formats were spending to much in customer loyalty program.

4.Big Bazaar customer loyalty program like Big Bazaar Profit club card, Future pay cash back were
the big investment. None other than Future Group spend so much on customer loyalty program.

5.And the experiments with own brands or provate label was also not successful.
thankyou