Sri Vijaya Puram, Sept. 7: Fashion moves fast. In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, getting it to the customer can take a month.
That distance, from the markets of mainland India to the racks of Sri Vijaya Puram (Port Blair), has shaped Sumit Goenka’s business for more than two decades. When he entered the clothing trade in 2005, the challenge was obvious: island customers wanted the same changing styles they saw elsewhere in India, but geography made getting them there slower, harder and more expensive.
Goenka saw possibility in that gap.
His family had arrived in the islands only a few years earlier. Originally from Bihar, they had lived in Rajasthan before moving to Andaman in 2001. A year later, Sumit’s elder brother, Amit Goenka, opened a clothing shop in Aberdeen Bazar, the commercial heart of Port Blair. He called it Goenka’s.
“We saw a good market and potential in the market,” Sumit recalled.
In 2005, three years after the first shop opened, Sumit joined his brother in the business. He had studied only until the tenth standard. There was no business-school education, no formal training in retail management. The shop became his classroom.
He learned the rhythms of an unusual market: what island customers wanted, what they were willing to pay, what sold quickly and what remained on the racks. More importantly, he learned how much geography mattered.
Running a fashion business in Andaman means operating with an obstacle that a retailer in Mumbai or Delhi rarely has to contemplate in quite the same way: the sea.
Merchandise sourced on the mainland can take about a month to reach the islands, Goenka says. Fashion, meanwhile, has little respect for shipping schedules.
Over the years, he developed a procurement system designed to overcome that distance. Today, he says, ten purchasers travel across India sourcing merchandise for his stores. In effect, the business has built a small network of eyes and ears on the mainland, looking for clothes that can eventually make their way across the Bay of Bengal.
Learning the Customer
Retail businesses often describe themselves in the language of scale, stores opened, markets entered, revenues generated. Goenka talks repeatedly about something less measurable: trust.
His proposition is uncomplicated. He wants to sell fashionable clothes at prices accessible to island residents without compromising on quality.
“My main focus is to provide minimum-rate fashion and good quality of the cloth to the islanders,” he said.
But price, he discovered, could bring a customer into a store only once. Bringing the same customer back required something else.
Goenka believes the group’s exchange policy became particularly important. In a relatively small market, where reputations travel quickly and relationships between shopkeepers and customers can stretch across years, the ability to return or exchange something was more than a retail convenience.
“Because our service is better, the exchange policy which SG Group provides to their customers has created trust, which helps us in bringing repeat customers,” he said.
There is something distinctly old-fashioned about this conception of retail. At a time when Indian fashion is increasingly shaped by algorithms, e-commerce platforms and national chains, Goenka describes his business largely through human relationships.
He has condensed the philosophy into three words: “Rage, Rate and Relation.”
The phrase is idiosyncratic, but the idea behind it is recognizable. Fashion must be current. The price must be right. And the relationship with the customer must survive the transaction.
Going His Own Way
For fifteen years, Goenka worked within the family enterprise. Then, in 2020, he decided to chart a separate course.
He began expanding the Goenka’s name under the SG Group, turning what had started as a family clothing business into his own independent retail operation.
The timing was hardly ideal. The year 2020 was a difficult moment to begin a new chapter in almost any physical retail business. Yet the network grew.
Today, Goenka operates eight stores under the SG Group. Another is planned for Hut Bay, on Little Andaman—an expansion that is significant not merely because it adds another outlet but because it takes the business deeper into the archipelago.
The trajectory says something about the peculiar economics of island entrepreneurship.
Businesses in Andaman operate inside a relatively small consumer market, but they must often manage supply chains extending across the Indian mainland. Every new store therefore represents two calculations at once: whether there are enough customers locally and whether merchandise can be moved across sufficient distances reliably enough to serve them.
Goenka’s solution has been persistence rather than reinvention.
More than two decades after he first entered his brother’s shop, he remains in essentially the same business: finding clothes elsewhere in India, bringing them to the islands and persuading customers that the combination of fashion, price and service is worth returning for.
The scale, however, has changed considerably.
In 2002, the Goenka family had one store in Aberdeen Bazar. Sumit joined three years later as a young man whose education in business would happen largely behind a shop counter. After striking out independently in 2020, he built a network that now extends across eight outlets, with Hut Bay next.
It is tempting to describe such a story through the familiar language of entrepreneurship—ambition, expansion and risk. But Goenka’s own explanation is considerably simpler.
He talks about rates. He talks about clothes. Most of all, he talks about customers coming back.
For a retailer on an island, perhaps that is the metric that matters most. Ships can take a month to arrive. Fashion can change before the merchandise does. Markets can shift.
Relationships, Goenka seems to have concluded, are easier to carry across the distance.
