Apparel giant Raymond is making inroads into smaller towns with its “Mini TRS” stores at a time of growing popularity of online retail across the country.

The Rs 6,025-crore company is beginning to taste success with the Mini TRS (The Raymond Shop) — an optimised format store for towns with population of 50,000 and above.

The first such store opened in March 2017, and Raymond has more than 200 of them.

Enthused by the success so far, the company is planning to set up another 100 such outlets over the next six months.

This will be followed by the rollout of 100 stores annually for the next three years.

“Close to two years ago, when we were evaluating our retail expansion plans, we saw that TRS has a good presence which was by far the largest by an retail apparel player.

“However, we realised there were about 1,200 towns in India which had a population of over 50,000 people and from a retail point of view, it made sense to enter these locations.

“We were already present in 386 towns, so there are another 800 towns that we can expand to,” Mohit Dhanjal, director — retail, Raymond Ltd, told The Telegraph.

He said the focus was to expand into smaller towns.

“The kind of brand awareness that exists in these towns is tremendous. There are lot

of small towns where consumers have growing aspiration and spending power. In fact, the first 100 stores that we opened in the first 13 months, the response has been twice what we had expected. We are witnessing good response in other locations as well,” he added.

While the regular TRS has a spread of over 2,500-sq-ft and it requires the franchisee to make an investment of around Rs 1.5-2 crore, the Mini TRS is optimised for around 800 sq feet and it requires an investment of up to Rs 50 lakh.

The positive response seen by Raymond for such outlets comes at a time e-commerce firms are gnawing away share from the traditional retailers. in categories like electronics and consumer durables.