Seattle Premium Outlet Mall

Capturing India's Percolating Coffee Market

The Café Coffee Day (CCD) location in Mumbai's upmarket Lokhandwala area is a favorite haunt of 23-year-old television actress Sweety Sangar. She visits this coffee shop, part of India's leading café chain, at least twice a week with her friends. "I love the ambience and the crowd here," says Sangar, sinking comfortably into a lounge chair. "I even discuss films [for possible work] with Bollywood directors here."

Just across the road is Barista, another popular coffee outlet. Two 30-year-old friends-cum-entrepreneurs dig into rich chocolate brownies in between working on their laptops. They are waiting to interview a candidate for their start-up. "This is a cool place to grill someone," says Tejas Mahurkar, one of the pair. In the same neighborhood is Café Mocha, yet another coffee shop. Like CCD and Barista, it too is a favorite with college students and young adults.

According to New Delhi-based research and consultancy firm Technopak Advisors, there are over 1,500 coffee cafes in India at present; of these, around 1,000 have opened in the past five years. Valu

Stirring up the market is India's growing youth segment: around 50% of India's 1.2 billion people are 25 or younger. By 2015, this is expected to increase to 55%. For this segment, particularly those with steady, disposable incomes, coffee shops serve as a social hub. "Coffee chains offer a basic emotional need -- refuge. They are brands between home and office," according to Shripad Nadkarni, managing director at Mumbai-based business and marketing consulting firm MarketGate Consulting.

"The growth [of cafés] has been triggered by rising youth spending, paucity of alternative hang-outs and an increasing number of new office complexes and colleges," adds Arvind Singhal, chairman of Technopak. The market, he says, has the potential to touch US$800 million to US$900 million with a total of 5,000 cafés by 2015. "The sector is wide open," agrees Gaurav Marya, president of franchise solutions firm Franchise India, which has six café clients.

It's not just local coffee chains that are looking to get a seat at the table. With growth slowing down in developed markets, India is fast becoming a hot spot for coffee retailers across the globe. "Foreign retailers have seen the phenomenal growth of homegrown brands like Café Coffee Day and Barista with increased out-of-home consumption of food. These companies have already established the café concept [in India], and the market is now beginning to look attractive to every coffee maker in the world. They feel they don't have to start from scratch," says Ramesh Srinivas, executive director at consulting firm KPMG.

My Shopping Trip to Seattle Premium Outlets – Win a $100 Giveaway ...

Do you have an Outlet addiction? Do you wish you did?

I am one person who loves to shop. If i can find something i like at a sale or clearance price, whew, my day is set!

My neighbor had told me about a huge mega mall outlet that was about 2 hours from us. I hurried to look it up and sure enough, 130 stores were called Seattle Premium Outlets . O-M-G.  I swear i felt my heart jump into my hand when i read the store names. Coach, Juicy Couture, Gymboree, The Childrens Place, DC Shoes, Vans, Sony, etc.  We made plans for a girls day on Feb 12th. Leaving our kids behind we started on our 2 hour drive.

Before we get to the shopping, i want to encourage you to do what we did… Sign up for the VIP Club. You will print out coupons for all the stores in your Outlet Center. Plus you will get their $5 coupon booklet free. The VIP Club is completely free too. It was well worth printing off. Ours was around 10 pages plus 2 coupon books. We saved a ton of money.

So we arrived and instantly the size of the mall hits you like a ton of bricks. Its huge and all i seen were brand names bouncing off my eyes. We ran to the rest rooms first then grabbed our goody bags and coupon books. Once we re-essembled ourselves we decided to hit Coach 1st. It was my main objective anyways. If i bought nothing else, i was getting my darn new bag. We had arrived when they opened (10am) and yet Coach had a line wrapped around the side and the inside was packed. They were having a 20% off sale on top of their regular prices. Did you know not one bag was over $200 in there! People were buying 5 or 6 bags each, it was a mad house! But, let me say, those ladies in there were amazing. The manager Wendy was walking around like a giddy school girl laughing and chatting to everyone. She approached us several times to help with our indecisiveness. She was a customer service gem! We ended up getting 2 purses and a coin purse. My choice was a $498 purse which i paid $172. My friends purse was $398 and she paid $160, plus a coin purse, org $58 and she paid less than $20.

Next up, we stopped at Juicy Couture, we did not purchase anything but did see some adorable kids clothing. However my girls would trash those fancy duds in no time, so we skipped on over to Reebok. There, my friend purchased the shoes she was dying for at half the price plus an extra $15 off (coupon!). Her Reebok Easy Tones, regularly $99 were only $73 after tax. Needless to say she was more than happy with that savings.

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