Health and beauty under one roof

Mohini Bhatnagar
06 December 2002

Valsad: Dr Morepen Ltd, the fast-moving health goods subsidiary of the Rs 430-crore Morepen Laboratories Ltd, has exciting plans for its health and beauty retail chain Lifespring, acquired from Total Care Pvt Ltd for Rs 12 crore in June 2002. An internationally styled, health and personal care retail store, Lifespring offers 15,000 domestic and international branded products under one roof.

Aravind Nagarajan, the newly appointed chief executive officer of Lifespring says Dr Morepen is reviewing its business model and looking at rightsizing the current retail format, as well as weeding out the slow-moving or non-profitable products. Mr Nagarajan revealed that at present about 40 per cent of the merchandise is being imported and Dr Morepen is planning to increase this proportion.

The company is planning to reduce the number of products to 8,000-10,000-from the present 15,000.

Dr Morepen may also opt for a smaller retail store of the size of 1,500 to 2000 sq ft for Lifespring, as well as make sizeable fresh investments in information technology (IT) infrastructure. Lifespring''s internal systems are currently under review.

The company believes that the objective of rationalisation is not just to cut down the number of products, but also to have greater focus. For Dr Morepen, the focus is health and in the past five months or so since Lifespring has been with Dr Morepen, there has been a subtle shift in its positioning from being a health and beauty store to becoming more of a health store.

Nagarajan says that earlier Lifespring as a store had a prominent slant towards beauty and Dr Morepen is making efforts to tilt it towards health.