Fashion is Reliance Retail’s ace in the hole

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Editor's note: It was the early 1980s. Dhirubhai Ambani had just stepped into the limelight. His company, Reliance Industries Ltd, had begun enlisting celebrities for its “Only Vimal” advertisements on TV, which had only recently gone colour in India.  Vimal, the company’s textile brand spanning suit fabrics to saris, had shot to prominence out of nowhere, weathering competition from long established brands like Bombay Dyeing, Raymond and Grasim. Probably because Reliance spared no expense on its promotion, airing ads mostly on Doordarshan’s prime time slots. But Dhirubhai’s overriding ambition at that point was to build a petrochemicals and refining business in the country that was second to none. A decade after Reliance’s IPO in 1977, the textile business began losing its pride of place in the company. Years later, his son Mukesh Ambani, as chairman of Reliance Industries, is resurrecting the business, slowly but surely. In the last five years, Reliance Retail’s fashion and lifestyle arm, Reliance Trends, has become the biggest player in the branded apparel business. Its annual revenue is higher than those of the next three offline players—Aditya Birla …