"COIMBATOREANS have a propensity to spend." This realisation made Kaya Skin Clinic open a branch in the city after opening clinics in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai for skin treatment. ("Kaya" in Sanskrit means body). It chose Coimbatore because it found that many of the customers who came to its Chennai clinic were from Coimbatore.
According to Ram Iyer, head (operations), Kaya Skin Clinic offered three kinds of services: skin care services for normal skin, for problem skin, and for ageing skin. Among the popular services on offer for normal skin are "Skin glow", which means skin polishing. Laser hair reduct is popular among woman with normal skin. For people with problem skin, pigment reduction service is offered. "For people with ageing skin, we have developed age control solutions. Here, we measure the skin age of a person, we compare the skin age with her/his physical age, and we treat the skin," he said.
Kaya has its own range of products for skin care. There are 125 dermatologists working in its 45 clinics - 43 in India and two abroad.
"We target the working class in selling our coconut oil and masala powders because their income is increasing. For one, they do not have the time to make masala powders and secondly, they do not know the formula," said R. Krisshnamurthi, managing director, Shanthi Fortune (India) Private Limited. The company is also into contract poultry farming.
M. Krishnan, chairman and managing director, Sri Krishna Sweets, Coimbatore, says: "We have 250 varieties of sweets but our flagship product is Mysore pa. We also have a wonderful range of halwas. We do a lot of research on them."
Sri Krishna Sweets was started as a restaurant-cum-sweet stall in Coimbatore in 1948 by Krishnan's father. Those were the days when sweet stalls displayed boards saying, "Sweets sold here are not made out of pure ghee." "We were the first to say that our sweets were made out of pure ghee," Krishnan said. Today, Sri Krishna Sweets has about 48 branches all over India. It plans to open an outlet in Dubai soon.
Nilgiris, which turned 100 in 2005, is a big supermarket chain known for its quality dairy, bakery and confectionary products and for meeting the daily needs of customers with a range of products. It had its origins in 1905 when S. Muthuswamy Mudaliar established a unit for producing and selling butter at Vannarpet in the Nilgiris at Coonoor. In 1939, Nilgiris set up shop in Bangalore, to supply milk and cream to the military farm at Hebbal and the camp for prisoners of war on Brigade Road. It went on to pioneer the supermarket concept in India and was the first to introduce bar coding for food retailing.
"At present, we directly hold 5 to 6 per cent of our units in Coimbatore, Bangalore and Chennai. We plan to increase the number of franchisee units from 35 to 100 by the end of this year," said M. Chellayyan, director, Nilgiri Dairy Farm Private Limited.
T.S. SubramanianCOMMents
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