Retailers Association of India

Retailers Association of India Retailers Association of India (RAI) is the unified voice of Indian retailers. for the benefit of it's members and the industry.

Retailers Association of India (RAI) always strives to bring best practices to the retail industry and it's stakeholders. RAI's efforts center around advocacy and government representations, bringing best practices to the industry, fostering retail learning and training, creating a reservoir of information through retail research, disseminating communication through magazines, newsletter, website, etc.

RAI, in partnership with Kumaraguru Institutions and powered by Forge Innovation & Ventures, launched Cohort 1 of PRICE ...
21/08/2026

RAI, in partnership with Kumaraguru Institutions and powered by Forge Innovation & Ventures, launched Cohort 1 of PRICE — Phygital Retail, Intelligent Commerce & Entrepreneurship — a specialisation track within Forge.Academy's 20-week ProtoSem innovation fellowship.

The premise is simple and overdue: physical stores, digital commerce, data and automation are converging faster than classrooms can keep pace with. So instead of case studies, these students get live problem statements sourced directly from RAI member organisations — and 20 weeks to turn them into functional prototypes, not slide decks.

Kumar Rajagopalan, CEO, RAI, opened the cohort with a special address — "Gen Z Consumer Experience to Retail Innovation: Reimagining the Shopping Experience" — unpacking how a generation that shops differently is forcing retail to rebuild its formats, its tech stack, and its instincts from the ground up.

The cohort itself is deliberately mixed — business, computer science, electronics, commerce — because a smart shelf or a personalisation engine doesn't get built by one discipline alone. Each team will work under an RAI-nominated retail mentor, with Forge Innovation Fellows on the technical and product side, building toward Demo Day in front of an industry jury.

This is what an industry–academia bridge looks like when it's actually load-bearing.

Shoppers Stop’s turnaround story is one of the most compelling stories in Indian retail right now. Kavindra Mishra Care ...
20/08/2026

Shoppers Stop’s turnaround story is one of the most compelling stories in Indian retail right now. Kavindra Mishra Care Associate – Managing Director & CEO, Shoppers Stop, will unpack it at Manning Modern Retail 2026 — 3rd September, The Westin Mumbai Garden City.

The room will have the people who actually shape retail organizations from the inside: CHROs and people leaders from 200+ brands, 50+ speakers across AI, data, customer experience and omnichannel, and 160+ organizations sending the folks who make hiring and culture calls, not just attend for the badge. Add 30+ media in the room and the conversations spill well past the panels.

Kavindra Mishra, Balbir Singh, Lawrence Gregory Fernandes (Ph. D.)

400+ delegates. One weekend. Register: www.mmr.net.in

And that’s a wrap on Chennai Retail Summit 2026! ✨A day filled with insightful conversations, fresh perspectives and mea...
20/08/2026

And that’s a wrap on Chennai Retail Summit 2026! ✨

A day filled with insightful conversations, fresh perspectives and meaningful connections that brought the retail community together.

A big thank you to our speakers, panellists, partners and every attendee who made the summit a truly memorable one. Here’s to shaping the future of retail, together.✨️

Celebrating the Winners of Chennai Retail Summit 2026! 🏆Congratulations to all the winners who made this celebration of ...
19/08/2026

Celebrating the Winners of Chennai Retail Summit 2026! 🏆

Congratulations to all the winners who made this celebration of retail excellence truly special.

Thank you for being part of a successful summit filled with industry insights, meaningful conversations, and valuable networking

A heartfelt congratulations to all the winners! 🎉

There’s a company that took ten years just to settle on its name.The word Titan came from a simple logic: it was a Tata ...
19/08/2026

There’s a company that took ten years just to settle on its name.

The word Titan came from a simple logic: it was a Tata Industries and Tamil Nadu collaboration. Take the first two letters of each. Ti. Ta. N. Titan. And from that almost accidental portmanteau came one of the most powerful brand names in Indian consumer history.

CK Kumaravel moderated one of the most quietly remarkable sessions at Chennai Retail Summit 2026 — a conversation between Vinay Kamath, author of TITAN: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand, and Bijou Kurien, Chairman of RAI, who watched the Titan story unfold from the inside.

On the word “inclusive”:
When Tata told the early team that Titan should be “exclusive, inclusive and supportive,” inclusive meant affordable. The entry-level quartz watch had to be positioned at just enough of a premium above mechanical watches to justify the shift — but not so much that it felt out of reach. Affordable premium, before anyone called it that.

On jewelry:
Tanishq failed first. They designed for international markets. European designs, 14-karat gold — neither of which an Indian consumer in 1994 trusted or wanted. The pivot came when they stopped trying to change the consumer and started adapting to them. And then came the karatmeter. The ability to walk into a store and test your gold’s purity on the spot. In a market built on personal relationships and local trust, that single innovation changed everything.

On who deserves more credit than they get:
Vinay named the engineering genius behind the Edge watch — employee number two at Titan, largely unknown publicly, responsible for creating what was at the time among the thinnest watches in the world. Entirely developed in India. The kind of quiet excellence that never makes headlines.

On what made Titan, Titan:
Bijou said it in one breath — brand name, retail, and an outstanding retail presence. Three things. Executed without compromise for four decades.

CKK closed by asking Vinay if he’d document the CK Kumaravel story as his next book. The room laughed. Vinay didn’t say no.

Footfalls have given way to eyeballs. And between the two, figuring out how to keep people coming back is the hardest pr...
19/08/2026

Footfalls have given way to eyeballs. And between the two, figuring out how to keep people coming back is the hardest problem in retail right now.

That was the thread running through the loyalty panel at Chennai Retail Summit 2026, moderated by Bijou Kurien, Chairman, Retailers Association of India.

Five categories. Five very different answers to the same question — why do customers come back?

Praveen Kumar of Jeyachandran said it plainly: price is copyable. Experience isn’t. Every touchpoint from the security guard at the entrance to the exit matters.

Suraj Shantakumar of Kirtilal Kalidas Jewellers put three pillars on the table for a low-frequency category like jewellery — fundamentals, adaptability, and innovation. The customer who comes in twice a year is also shopping three other jewellers.

Sujatha Yarnagula of Donracks made the B2B loyalty case simply: 70% of their business comes from existing customers or referrals. 22,000 customers. 18,000 projects.

Charath Narasimhan of Indian Terrain said the most quietly radical thing of the session: loyalty in apparel isn’t dead, it’s just misunderstood. People come back to the brand because of the person in the store who remembers them.

And on Gen Z loyalty specifically, Charath said something worth sitting with: Gen Z is harder to win but more powerful when you do. They’ll do their homework. They’ll test your authenticity.

Bijou’s closing thought was the sharpest of the afternoon. You can’t control how many people come through your filter. What you can control is what happens to the few who do.

That’s loyalty. Everything else is just a discount programme with a fancier name.

That one insight from Venkatesh Vijayaraghavan, MD & CEO of TTK Prestige, in conversation with Dr. Hitesh Bhatt at Chenn...
19/08/2026

That one insight from Venkatesh Vijayaraghavan, MD & CEO of TTK Prestige, in conversation with Dr. Hitesh Bhatt at Chennai Retail Summit 2026, tells you everything about how Indian consumer behaviour has shifted — and how a 70-year-old brand is thinking about it.
A few things from the conversation that deserve to travel further than the room:

On brand coherence across 1,500 SKUs and 70,000 outlets: Two things. Present the brand consistently everywhere. Never compromise on quality.
When those two are non-negotiable, scale becomes a discipline problem, not a brand problem.

On innovation:
No idea gets rejected at Prestige. It just gets shelved until the market is ready for it. Their R&D team was recently asked to go back and look at ideas rejected ten years ago. Most of them are relevant now.

On copying ideas:
“There is nothing wrong in copying an idea. Making an idea successful is very different from generating an idea.” Said without any ego. Meant entirely seriously.

On quick commerce:
They were skeptical. Blinkit wasn’t. Blinkit put pressure cookers on their platform and ran short of demand. Prestige is now selling cookers in ten minutes. The brand was so trusted the discovery step was already done — consumers just needed the convenience.

On channel strategy:
One price. Everywhere. No differential pricing across general trade, large format, e-commerce, or own stores. The consumer should never feel the brand is playing them against each other.

On building trust without 70 years of history:
“Stay true to the customer. Choose your consumer segment and don’t give them a reason to feel you’ve abandoned them. Trust builds automatically if you do that consistently.”

The closing advice to the room was five words. Stay true to your Customer.

Seventy years of brand building, distilled to that.

Every third person in India is Gen Z. 400 million people. And yet the panel at Chennai Retail Summit 2026 on the Gen Z s...
19/08/2026

Every third person in India is Gen Z. 400 million people. And yet the panel at Chennai Retail Summit 2026 on the Gen Z shopper kept arriving at the same uncomfortable truth: we’ve been asking the wrong question.

It’s not “how do you reach Gen Z?” It’s “how do you build something worth reaching them with?”

Dr. Hitesh Bhatt moderated a panel that covered more ground than its title suggested — from airport retail to saree vending machines to what makes a 13-year-old’s behaviour consistent across every generation.

Ramya Devanathan of Madras Sarees started with zero stores, a ten-by-ten room, and a WhatsApp number. Today she has two lakh customers, 400 orders a day, an average order value of ₹1,800 — and she’s about to launch India’s first saree vending machine. The lesson: you don’t need a store to build a brand. You need a story told in the right language.

Pooja Srinivasa of A2B said it simply — Gen Z likes authenticity. The heritage doesn’t need to change. The way you tell it does. They’re opening see-through kitchens so customers can watch what goes into their food. Trust isn’t assumed anymore. It’s demonstrated.

Rajneesh Mahajan of Inorbit Malls said malls are no longer shopping destinations. They’re community centres. Hangout spaces. Social infrastructure. The brands that understand that are winning. The ones still thinking about footfall as a retail metric are missing the point.

And Sneha Jain of Vidvedaa brought the airport retail lens: 20,000 passengers departing from Chennai Terminal 1 every single day. Every one of them is a captive, high-intent audience with dwelling time and a credit card. The “airport look” is now a real category. Brands that missed it are scrambling to get in.

The closing question Hitesh put to the panel: you’re designing the perfect Gen Z store experience, no budget limit. What’s the one thing it must have?

The answers: aesthetically unmissable. Informative not just transactional. Values and value together. AI-powered personalisation. And — the one that landed last and loudest — memories worth reliving.

Every retailer in the room knew this truth before Himalika Singh from Google said it out loud.Your customer’s journey to...
19/08/2026

Every retailer in the room knew this truth before Himalika Singh from Google said it out loud.

Your customer’s journey to your store starts on their phone. Not at your door.

They search “coffee shop near me.” They look at ratings. They check photos. They read reviews. And they decide — standing a few blocks away from your store — whether they’re coming in or going somewhere else.

The question Google put to 300+ retailers at Chennai Retail Summit 2026 was simple: is your store visible at that moment?

What Google has built answers exactly that. Google Local Ads for merchants — now available directly through the GPay app — takes a retailer’s Google Maps profile, uses Gemini AI to build an optimised ad in 30 seconds, and puts that store in front of high-intent customers who are searching nearby and ready to walk in.

No agency. No technical complexity. No 30-screen setup process.

An electronics store spent ₹5,000 and got 1,400 direction and call clicks. A biryani restaurant. A salon. Real merchants, real numbers, shown inside the app so owners can see exactly what’s working.

The customer is searching. The only question is whether they find you.

Google

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