In recent times, our fascination towards supercars such as Lamborghini, Ferrari, Audi, Mercedes, Jaguar and many others have increased manifold. However, they cost a fortune due to which not everyone can afford such beasts. For many years, this remained a major problem due to which people started looking for an alternative to have these supercars at an affordable place. Today we are going to talk about a firm which established itself as the solution to this problem. We are talking about none other than Gurugram based Big Boy Toyz.
The company has two main outlets; one is a 36,000 square foot showroom located at Hero Honda Chowk, Gurugram. The other outlet is a 5500 square foot glittering studio located in Sultanpur, New Delhi. By means of an ambitious expansion strategy, Big Boy Toyz is slated to further strengthen its position as the biggest name in the Indian luxury car market. Big Boy Toyz caters to a niche target audience. Its founder Jatin Ahuja has been remarkable to the company’s success in selling pre-owned luxury cars.
Importers of many firsts in India
The journey of BBT began in 2003 when Jatin was 17 and now he is 34, it’s been 17 years in the business. He made a profession out of his passion and so at BBT they do business with passion. Sometimes they are so zealous that they forget all the commercial aspects of business and do it by heart which is primarily the reason that not a single customer in the history of last 17 years turned out to be dissatisfied. The BBT family is now 170+ strong and everyone is contributing towards the progress of this organisation.
They work very closely with a lot of brands like BMW, Maseratti, and Mercedes. BBT has an inventory of more than 100 plus cars right now.
Back in 2003, Jatin started with a college project buying a Fiat Palio at Rs 70,000 and became a serious entrepreneur after completing his mechanical engineering. Big Boy Toyz as a firm came into existence in 2009. BBT sold a lot of Range Rovers and Land cruisers. Apart from this, the first Porsche Panamera and the first BMW X6 was imported by them in the country. At the time, this was the origin of the organisation.
Market size of luxury cars in India
As a part of the luxury cars segment, Audi, BMW and Mercedes put together sell around 35000 units every year. However, they don’t go much into the A4, A6 or the E class C class segment. Out of these 35000 units, there are about 10000 units which come under their segment. At Rs 50 lakh onwards this segment begins.
In Mumbai and Delhi, they have a physical front. 40 percent of the cars that BBT sells, the customers don’t pay a visit to the showroom. They scroll at the pictures online, look at the quality through the pictures, then payment is made online and the car is then delivered. They have got customers not only in urban areas but in rural areas too comprising areas such as Kolhapur, Nasik, Jammu Kashmir and PAN India.
They get customers from both online and offline mode where online mode accounts to 40 per cent of the business and also most of the offline customers are converted through online. They see about 20 to 25 people at every location within a day.
Loyal fan base
They sell one or two cars every day. Their conversion rate is 1 per cent because BBT is an open showroom to anyone, even the ones who want to click pictures at any given point of time. Most of the customers today have started buying cars without even seeing them. People have become confident with the product that Big Boy Toys is selling.
There is not one customer till date who is not satisfied. A customer doing Rupees 2 crore RTGS without even seeing the car is the kind of trust you can see from customers of BBT. Their retention rate or the satisfaction rate is similar or more than any other luxury car brand.
They have been sponsoring a few shows like Splitsvilla in MTv, Big Boy Toys GenX Fashion Show. When it comes to online, on Facebook they have 2.1 million followers and on Instagram they have around 400k subscribers.
They have their own merchandise like perfume, T-shirts and caps. This is because when Jatin was a kid he wanted to buy a Mercedes and he had bought a Mercedes keychain so that he could feel the luxury. In the same way, if someone is not able to afford the luxury car, he could have that luxury feel by means of those merchandises.
Collaborations with top actors
They have done about 35 to 40 music videos till now. They have done collaborations with Sonakshi Sinha, for DJ wale babu and many more. They were a part of the first supercar movie with Dharma in India called Drive. Jatin’s business philosophy is such that he believes in selling a product which he can recommend to his family. If he cannot use the product himself, he doesn’t have the confidence of selling it.
Throughout the country, they have a team running left, right, centre. The challenge is not selling but buying. Their rejection rate is 85%. A car driven above 25000 kms gets rejected, cars that have changed spare parts gets rejected. When quality standards are not upto the mark, it gets rejected. Buying a car is not a problem but buying a good quality car is a problem.
Apart from this, they are not limited to luxury cars, they sell merchandises too such as perfumes, pens, and cards etc.
