Leadership
At a time when every retailer is looking to expand their assortments – at less cost and with less risk – Anko Global is offering a smart solution.
Anko Global is the international markets division of Kmart Group (Australia). The Group operates bricks and mortar stores in Australia and New Zealand, but established Anko Global as a division tasked with taking its Anko house brand and distributing it in markets around the world.
“We can provide retailers and brands product solutions across entire categories and subcategories, which can then help them drive stronger sales growth, higher margins, higher stock turns, and they can also reduce the number of SKUs they carry, ” said Arjun Puri, CEO, Anko Global.
“The way we’re doing that is we provide options for both Anko branded products as well as white label solutions to our customers across North America, Central America, Europe and Asia,” said Mr. Puri.
“We are offering the same products and categories and designs which we have created for our own business in Australia and New Zealand, under the Anko brand. Right now, we are focusing on the non-apparel categories. We’re taking our soft and hard home goods to the global markets.
Anko has recently developed a range of wooden toys for Mattel in the United States under their Fisher Price brand and have other partnerships including trialing Anko pet products in some Carrefour stores in France.
“Our business model is very unique in the sense that 90% of everything that we sell in Kmart stores across Australia and New Zealand is under the Anko brand. The strength of the product is that we’ve got a very strong product development team, which we have developed over the last 10 – 15 years.
“The products have very universal content and design that can appeal to customers in many international markets. The packaging is also designed in a way that it will resonate with pretty much all customers across the world,” said Mr. Puri.
Like most big retailers, Kmart had developed a private label brand.
But unlike many others, they wanted to grow that brand outside of their own retail outlets.
“We’ve had aspirations and ambitions to do something more broadly outside of Australia and New Zealand for over 5 or 6 years now. We started to do something pre COVID by getting into wholesale supply agreements with retailers across Asia, starting out by supplying retailers in Thailand and Indonesia.
After the pandemic was over, Anko decided to take this business model into more global markets. In mid 2022 they established their international markets division called Anko Global.
The core of this business model is to take the successful products that Anko has developed for its own stores and then scale production.
“This is a business model built on leverage. Anko is already being sold across Kmart and Target stores in Australia, with millions of units of different products. We can use this scale to continually deliver low-cost products at an incredible value and price point.
The benefit for our retail customers, as well as our branded customers, is that they don’t need to start from scratch. It’s an out of the box turnkey solution which is available to them,” said Mr. Puri.
While Anko Global doesn’t have minimum order sizes for its branded products, MOQs will come into play if the customer needs any modifications.
“For example, if the customer needs multi-country or multilingual packaging, then we have to redo the packaging. In this case, there could be minimums that need to be met.”
However, overall retail customers get the benefits of the economies of scale that Anko has already built into its supply chain.
“The cost of sourcing is low because we work with manufacturers directly. We manage the supply chain and the logistics, so even that cost is low,” said Mr. Puri.
Anko’s products already compete – and win – in highly competitive markets. This gives other retailers some assurance that those products are likely to be successful in their own markets.
“We probably have one of the largest design teams of any retailer in the southern hemisphere. We’ve got close to 100 people based in Melbourne, who are working on design full time.
This is backed up by designers across Asia.
“The Australia design team is supported by people whom we have in Asia. We’ve got a core group which works out of Delhi, which is a center of excellence for the graphic design team. We’ve got people who work in China as well as Hong Kong. They all collaborate together because design teams also need to be very closely plugged into the manufacturing network.
“We deal head on against some of the world’s strong brands and retailers and we do exceedingly well. We’re number 1 or number 2 in every product category we play in in Australia. And I’m not just talking about competing against discount department stores. I’m talking about competing more broadly across the market,” said Mr. Puri.
This is all supported by competitive pricing because of the volumes that Anko does.
Like most large retailers, Anko sources from a growing list of countries in Asia including China, Bangladesh, India as well as emerging sourcing destinations like Vietnam, among others. They are often sharing factories with major USA and European retailers.
“A core part of our proposition is that we can take away a lot of the thinking, and leave retailers to focus on the most important thing in their business – their customer. Equally as important is that we are not a sourcing agent. When they speak to us, it’s one retailer speaking to another retailer. We understand the pain points. We understand the challenges because we manage those dynamics in our own business on a day-to-day basis.” said Mr. Puri.
Because Anko’s products are developed for the Australian and New Zealand markets, they meet those nation’s sustainability standards, which are some of the strictest in the world.
“The way our supply chain is set up, we already meet all those requirements.
“I think that should give confidence to anybody who works with us due to the size, scale and capability of our operations”
Typically, there is very little adjustment that needs to be done to meet compliance regulations in other nations. But if it is required, we can also accommodate that, said Mr. Puri.
At a time when retailers face a growing number of challenges – from product development to managing costs – being able to leverage the investment that Anko has made to develop and source products that have proven track records at retail could be the solution that many are looking for.
“This business model is new so it might take a while for people to understand and become comfortable with it. However, once they’ve understood it, I think they will see that it is quite a big opportunity,” said Mr. Puri.
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