Nairobi — Nakumatt Holdings officially opened the doors to the first Clarks footwear concept store in sub-Sahara Africa at its Thika Road Mall.
During the launch of the first store, Nakumatt Holdings Regional Strategy and Operations Director Thiagarajan Ramamurthy disclosed that plans are also underway to open three Skechers footwear stores in coming days to complete the first phase of the footwear departmental stores rollout.
"To confirm the importance attached to this project, the opening of both the Clarks and Skechers stores is backed by a more than Sh480 million investment budget," Ramamurthy said. "This budget covers critical elements relating to the stores development, merchandising and staff training."
Speaking at the launch, Clarks Africa Brand Manager, Abbas Fatepurwalla said Clarks; the world number one in 'everyday footwear', brand will be targeting to sell more than 1 million pairs of shoes every year in Kenya in the next three years.
"Globally, Clarks sells more than 50 million pairs of premium footwear every year and we are looking forward to Nakumatt's contribution on the global sales targets," Fatepurwalla said.
"As exemplified by our association with Nakumatt, Clarks, global aim is to open 100 new stores every year across the world for the next five years."
Established in 1825 by brothers James and Cyrus Clark, the Clarks footwear brand has evolved into a leading global footwear retailer with sales in excess of £1.4 billion.
Nakumatt Holdings recently announced plans to aggressively pursue a departmental store development project at an investment cost of Sh1.2 billion as part of the firm's revenue diversification strategy.
Having sealed an exclusive regional deal with Revlon last year and lately with L'Oreal to rollout mini departmental stores for Revlon and Maybelline products respectively, Nakumatt is training its focus on lifestyle based departmental stores due to the latent market demand