Bacca Bucci Offline Entry: Field Research for a Vague Retail Brief

Saanvi worked on a project for Barkabuki, a shoe brand looking to plan its offline retail entry. The brief was open-ended: the client wanted retail formats and a recommendation on how to approach offline expansion, but had not specified preferred locations, store types, or any other parameters.

She broke the problem into parts. The first step was understanding Barkabuki's own business model, then mapping how its closest competitors had approached their offline entries. This gave the team a baseline without simply copying the competitive playbook.

Online research on potential markets was limited. The data available was not specific enough to make a credible location recommendation to the client. Rather than present a recommendation built on thin evidence, Saanvi went to Kamla Nagar market in Delhi herself to do a field check. She chose Kamla Nagar because it already housed a store from Sold Store, one of Barkabuki's direct competitors, making it a live test of the competitive environment.

At the market, she assessed footfall, observed the Sold Store's customer profile, and gauged how many visitors were converting to purchases. This gave her ground-level evidence that online research could not provide.

The team used these inputs to design retail formats and a full omnichannel plan for Barkabuki. The client responded positively to the field check, noting that the team had gone beyond desk research to validate the recommendation in person.