and Beijing in October, and culminated with the stop in Mumbai, where guests turned out to meet the team decked out in their spotless and treasured Canali suits. That included Bollywood stars Arjun Kapoor, Sanjay Kapoor and Imran Khan who turned out to help the company celebrate during an event at IFBE at Ballard Estate, a former ice factory that has been reimagined into an event space.
The brand has had a presence in India for the past two decades, but efforts increased this year when it opened its seventh retail store — a flagship — at the Jio World Plaza in March. In India, 61 percent of Canali sales come from formalwear, 22 percent from casualwear, 10 percent from the Nawab collection, a collection created for the Indian market in 2009, and 7 percent from shoes and accessories. Top-performing categories include suits, which account for 18 percent of the India business, followed by jackets and shirts at 15 percent, and trousers and jeans at 13 percent.
There’s no question the Indian wedding market is a big driver for fashion retail, and Canali’s recent launch of a bandhgala — Indian formalwear — has worked well. “Indian consumers do have passion for weddings, and there is a need for sophisticated offerings where the wedding suits are concerned,” he said. “Canali has been paying close attention to it for many decades, and we came up with something specific — we embraced the bandhgala jacket, giving our own interpretation to this.
At the same time, he said, Canali believes its reach among Indian consumers can be much wider than simply the bandhgala, and the company is planning to add a “lifestyle component” to its offering in the future as it works to capitalize on the growth of the Indian market. The country’s GNP continues to grow at approximately 7 percent, and according to Knight Frank’s “The Wealth Report 2024,” there is likely to be 50 percent growth in individuals with total wealth of more than $30 million.