Book Summary – It Happened in India by Kishore Biyani

Following is the summary of the book “It Happened in India” written by Kishore Biyani, the founder of Future group and brands like Big Bazaar, Central, Pantaloons, Brand Factory and several others.

• The four emotions that determine shopping behavior.
  A. Greed
  B. Altruism
  C. Fear
  D. Envy
• Journey of Kishore Ji
  1. Started organized Dandiya program of the housing society.
  2. Joined the family business for some time.
  3. Trading of 200 meters of stone-wash fabric.
  4. Started buying good fabric from fabric manufacturers and selling these to garment manufacturers under brand WBB.
  5. Started Manufacturing the trousers.
  6. Started a shop to sell trousers with name Patloon.
  7. Started a factory to manufacture fabric.
  8. Took Distributorship of Arvind Mills.
  9. Manufacturing of branded trousers “Pantaloon”.
  10. Opened chain of Pantaloon stores selling trousers. Started from Goa.
  11. Started manufacturing all men apparels and accessories and selling them on pantaloon shop.
  12. Launched clothing brands under various names just to attract different customer bases. Like john miller, Bare and others.
  13. Launched ready-to-stitch product.
  14. First Pantaloons showroom started in Kolkata.
  15. Multiple outlets of Pantaloons opened.
  16. Started preparing for Big Baazar.
• At a stage, it is tempting to move from one conference to another and make new relationships and get investments. But KishoreJi remained focused on his business model and customers, kept stock markets updated and money didn’t remain a problem for growth.
• Train your people for everything you want them to do. For everything, you want to achieve. If watching your customer and learning from it is your strategy, you need to train your people for this. You can’t do all these things. Maybe the job remain for a leader is to set objectives, find people, train them and let them achieve that. Forget you can do any other thing Best.
• Inspired by “Nimboo-Mirchi” hanging on the doors, pantaloons designed garments in yellow and green and those went hit.
• People don’t buy products, they buy feelings & happiness.
• As a seller or salesman, you should like the customer you are approaching. Customer should feel comfortable approaching you.
• If you have done a mistake get out of it very fast. Get rid of that. Don’t waste money or time to correct that. Don’t put good money to recover the bad money.
• Despite all your personal strengths, abilities, skills and whatever you have, the only thing which can make you win the entrepreneurial journey is to identify the right people for the right place at the right time. Team Building. When Kishore Biyani decided to build Big Bazaar, he built a team around this idea and made them visit the Saravana store which was the model for big bazaar. And asked the team to do everything. KishoreJi’s job was to take decisions, that’s it.
• Don’t be a “Very good boy” in business. Not a single entrepreneur has lived a spotless life. Copying to corruption to affairs, at least something or a few things they have used at times when things were not moving. Big Bazaar used the idea to distribute fake currency notes to do marketing of big bazaar. Once an agent got arrested for that as it was against the law but as the idea was hit, Kishore allowed continuing the same in all other cities.
• Movie making was a failure for them, but still, movies play an important role in their strategy to understand psychology & trends.