Fashioning Value Retail: Lalit Agarwal’s Math with 600 V-Mart Stores

At 600 stores, V-Mart remains overwhelmingly a fashion business. Behind the scale is a very different kind of fashion machine — one built around affordable price points, private labels, faster design-to-shelf cycles, localised assortment and increasingly disciplined inventory…

The most revealing number about V-Mart Retail’s 600-store milestone is not 600. It is 79%.

That is the share of V-Mart’s FY26 revenue that came from apparel, making it clear that despite its “one-stop family shop” positioning, the company remains fundamentally a fashion retailer. Non-apparel contributed 10% and FMCG 11%. The fashion proposition covers men, women and children across casual, formal, ethnic, western, sports and active wear, innerwear, nightwear and accessories. (BSE India)

That distinction matters because V-Mart’s latest growth is not being built by simply putting more stores on the map. The company ended FY26 with ₹3,789 crore revenue and 577 stores, and Q1 FY27 revenue rose 23% to ₹1,088.8 crore. Same-store sales growth accelerated to 9%, while Unlimited, its southern fashion business, delivered 13%. The fashion engine is therefore expanding both through physical reach and through better performance from the existing estate.

For Lalit Agarwal, who has spent more than two decades building V-Mart around affordable fashion, the more interesting challenge now is not how to make value fashion available in more places. It is how to keep fashion fresh, relevant and profitable at 600-plus stores without losing the price proposition that brings the customer in.

THE ₹300–₹400 FASHION EQUATION

V-Mart’s fashion proposition has always started with price.

Agarwal has consistently described value fashion as offering contemporary designs at significantly more accessible prices than mainstream national retailers. The company’s average selling price for apparel has remained around the ₹300–₹400 range, depending on format, season and geography; the company has also identified the ₹1,000 price point as an important sweet spot as it expands its assortment.

This creates an unusual merchandising equation. V-Mart cannot simply buy fashionable merchandise cheaply and expect the model to work. At these price points, the business needs considerable control over product selection, sourcing, volume, replenishment and inventory.

Its answer has been a combination of scale and private labels.

The FY25 annual report showed private labels contributing 64% of apparel sales, with the portfolio including brands such as Flick, Be Princess, Charcoal, Desi Mix, Twist and other in-house labels. The strategy is not positioned simply as a margin play. Agarwal has explicitly maintained that V-Mart does not create private labels merely to earn a differentiated gross margin; the objective is to curate designs, quality and products that are distinctive to the retailer while maintaining the value equation.

V-MART’S FASHION EQUATION

The significance of the private-label portfolio is that it gives V-Mart greater control over what reaches the rack. In value fashion, that can be more important than simply having a large number of brands. The retailer can decide the silhouette, fabric, colour, price architecture and depth of a product rather than merely choosing from what an external brand has already created.

That is particularly relevant when the consumer is looking for fashion at a price that leaves little room for error.

THE NEW COMPETITIVE EDGE IS FRESHNESS

The fashion business has another problem at scale: by the time a trend is identified, designed, sourced, manufactured and distributed, it can already be moving on.

V-Mart has been working on shortening that gap.

Its design-to-shelf cycle has come down from around 80 days to approximately 70–75 days, with management saying it still wants to reduce the cycle further. The improvement has come from tighter inventory management, greater relevance in assortment, inter-store transfers and better planning.

This is one of the less visible changes inside V-Mart, but potentially one of the most important for its fashion business.

The company now has separate teams working on final design and fabric requirements, allowing fabric planning to begin well before the design is finalised. By the end of FY26, V-Mart had already blocked around 50–60% of its fabric requirements through December, giving its sourcing system greater visibility into upcoming demand while raw-material prices remained volatile.

The logic is straightforward: fashion needs speed, but value fashion cannot afford fashion’s usual waste.

The retailer therefore has to move faster without buying blindly.

WHEN POLYESTER BECOMES A RETAIL ISSUE

For a premium fashion brand, a change in yarn prices can be absorbed to some extent through pricing. For V-Mart, where affordability is central to the proposition, raw-material inflation is much more delicate.

Agarwal has pointed out that yarn and fabric account for a substantial proportion of apparel costs, with lower-priced products carrying a higher yarn component. The fibre mix also changes by season: polyester becomes more significant in the festive and winter period, while cotton has a greater role during summer.

This makes sourcing a strategic part of fashion merchandising rather than a back-office procurement function.

V-Mart has responded through advance fabric booking, vendor negotiations, product engineering and efforts to protect availability without passing the entire increase through to consumers. Management’s decision to secure a significant proportion of upcoming fabric requirements is therefore not merely a supply-chain precaution; it is an attempt to protect the fashion proposition from becoming more expensive.

For a retailer whose customer comes precisely because fashion can be bought affordably, that is critical.

THE STORE HAS TO FEEL LIKE A FASHION DESTINATION

There is another aspect of V-Mart’s model that becomes increasingly important as the business grows: the customer experience inside the store.

Agarwal has described value-fashion consumers as needing considerable assistance in navigating a large assortment, particularly where styling, product choice and store organisation are concerned. The company’s approach has therefore been to combine breadth with customer assistance rather than assume that a large-format store automatically creates a good fashion experience.

That is especially relevant to V-Mart because its assortment is deliberately broad. A single store may need to move between women’s ethnic wear, men’s casualwear, children’s clothing, footwear, accessories and seasonal merchandise without becoming visually confusing.

The challenge is to make affordability look like choice, rather than compromise.

That is where visual merchandising, store refurbishment, product presentation and the role of frontline employees become part of the fashion proposition.

THE REGIONAL FASHION MAP IS NOT ONE COLOUR

V-Mart’s geography also makes its fashion business different from a conventional national chain.

The company has built much of its network in Tier II, III and IV markets, but the assortment cannot simply be replicated identically across all of them. Its own product philosophy emphasises adapting to differences in cultures, geographies and consumer aspirations.

The cluster strategy helps here.

When V-Mart builds density in a region, it acquires more information about what customers buy, when they buy it and which products travel well between stores. Inter-store transfers can then move slow merchandise towards a market where it has greater relevance rather than leaving the product trapped in the wrong location. That is one reason the reduction in inventory days becomes a fashion story, not merely a financial one.

FY26 inventory days improved from 96 to 93, while inventory per store fell 13%. By Q1 FY27, inventory days had moved down further to 86.

For fashion, fresh inventory is productive inventory.

UNLIMITED GIVES V-MART A SECOND FASHION ACCENT

If V-Mart is the large-scale value-fashion engine, Unlimited gives the group a different regional fashion proposition.

Acquired from Arvind Lifestyle Brands in 2021, Unlimited operates primarily in South India and has a somewhat different store and customer profile. Its recent performance suggests the format is gaining traction: Q1 FY27 revenue grew about 33%, EBITDA increased around 40% and SSSG reached 13%, ahead of the core V-Mart business.

That performance matters beyond the numbers.

V-Mart does not need to make every part of its fashion business look identical. South India has its own fashion preferences, climate, competitive structure and cost environment. Unlimited provides a format through which the group can build a regional fashion business while applying the broader V-Mart discipline around value, sourcing and productivity.

The challenge is equally clear. Higher real-estate costs in southern markets mean expansion has to be selective, with Agarwal emphasising sustainable returns rather than opening stores simply to increase the footprint.

That makes Unlimited an interesting test of whether V-Mart’s fashion model can travel without becoming a cookie-cutter proposition.

LIMEROAD: WHEN A FASHION STORE GETS A DIGITAL EXTENSION

LimeRoad is the smallest of V-Mart’s three principal businesses, but its relevance to fashion is potentially larger than its current financial contribution.

The digital marketplace’s losses fell sharply in FY26, while V-Mart has increasingly connected its store inventory to online orders. The opportunity is obvious: a garment sitting in a store in one city should not necessarily be restricted to customers who walk into that store.

The physical network can become a distributed fashion inventory pool.

That is particularly valuable in value fashion because individual SKUs may have relatively small demand pools. A digital channel can widen the customer base for merchandise without requiring every physical store to carry the same depth.

V-Mart’s omnichannel approach therefore has a fashion-specific purpose: improve the productivity and reach of the merchandise already bought.

600 STORES DO NOT MEAN 600 IDENTICAL FASHION STORES

This is perhaps where the V-Mart story becomes most interesting from a fashion-industry perspective.

The company has grown through a common value proposition, but its fashion operation increasingly depends on differentiation at several levels: private labels, regional assortment, format, price points, sourcing, design speed and digital access.

The underlying portfolio has also become more sophisticated.

This is why the 600-store milestone is particularly relevant to fashion.

At 100 stores, a retailer can still depend heavily on individual buying decisions and local knowledge. At 600, the organisation needs systems that can replicate good fashion decisions across hundreds of locations without flattening regional differences.

V-Mart’s evolution is increasingly about building precisely that system.

THE LALIT AGARWAL SCHOOL OF VALUE FASHION

Agarwal’s retail journey began around the family garment business and later included his association with Vishal Mega Mart before V-Mart became his principal business. The experience has kept him unusually close to the fundamentals of merchandise.

His approach to fashion has never been built around the idea that a value consumer wants less fashion. Quite the opposite: the proposition is to deliver more fashion within the customer’s budget.

That is why V-Mart has stayed overwhelmingly focused on apparel even while experimenting with FMCG, home, footwear, accessories and digital commerce. The company stopped expanding grocery-led stores years ago because it saw greater differentiation and capability in fashion. The logic has remained consistent: concentrate on the categories where the organisation can create distinctive value rather than broaden the business simply for the sake of assortment.

The result is a model that looks deceptively simple from the shop floor.

Behind a ₹300–₹500 garment is a much more complicated chain of decisions around design, fabric, vendor capacity, price, volume, geography, store presentation and inventory.

At 600 stores, that machinery has to work every day.

THE NEXT FASHION CHALLENGE IS NOT SCALE. IT IS PRECISION

V-Mart now has the physical reach to make value fashion a very large business. The harder task is maintaining relevance as fashion cycles accelerate and consumers become more exposed to trends through smartphones, social media and digital marketplaces.

The retailer’s recent financial performance suggests that the model is holding up. FY26 revenue grew 16%, while Q1 FY27 accelerated to 23%. Existing-store growth reached 9% in the latest quarter, and inventory productivity has improved alongside the expansion. But the fashion test will ultimately be whether those numbers can be sustained without sacrificing freshness or value.

Raw-material inflation adds another layer of complexity. Competition is intensifying at the value end. New formats are attempting to shorten fashion cycles further. Digital platforms are changing how customers discover products. And consumers who once prioritised price above everything else are becoming increasingly demanding about style, quality and experience.

V-Mart’s response is not to abandon value.

It is to make value fashion more sophisticated.

Faster design-to-shelf. More private-label control. Better fabric planning. More precise inventory allocation. Regional relevance. A second fashion format in Unlimited. A digital extension through LimeRoad.

The 600-store network is therefore less interesting as a number than as a test of whether this fashion machine can continue to scale without losing its precision.

For Lalit Agarwal, that may be the real fashion story behind V-Mart at 600: not how cheaply the retailer can sell a garment, but how intelligently it can create, source, position and move that garment — while keeping it affordable enough for the customer who made the model possible in the first place.