Rockport store opens at Centralworld

  The footwear brand has launched a “try-on” campaign to recruit new customers to try Rockport footwear on for themselves, and giving them discounts of up to 20 per cent when they buy a pair. The campaign will be held from March 1-15 at all Rockport retail outlets, for any product.
Opened at a cost of about Bt2 million, the Rockport store on the third floor of CentralWorld shopping complex has 63 square metres of total retail space. Two more stores of Rockport footwear will be opened by the end of this year in Bangkok, occupying retail space of 60-90sqm.
The company has also opened a store at Central Pattaya Beach in Pattaya, said Chukiat Tokamoltham, consumer-products manager of DKSH (Thailand), the distributor of Rockport shoes.
“We expect to double sales of Rockport footwear in Thailand from between 20,000 and 25,000 pairs per annum to about 40,000-50,000 pairs in the next two or three years,” he said.
Chukiat said the company also expected to increase Rockport’s share of Thailand’s Bt1-billion premium footwear market to about 10 per cent from the low single digits in the next three years.
He said the Rockport brand had enjoyed an overwhelmingly satisfactory response among consumers during the two years it has been engaged in active marketing in Thailand.
In addition to its own stores, Rockport footwear is available at more than 30 branches of local department stores such as Central, Siam Paragon, Imperial, The Mall and Robinson.
Working in the brand’s favour is the urban trend away from owning private vehicles to using mass transport, such as the BTS Skytrain and MRT subway, because of economic woes and the climbing petrol price, resulting in more walking.
Its technology – shared with major global brand Adidas – enables Rockport to cater to the needs of consumers who are spending more time walking. The brand’s unique way of applying the know-how of sports footwear to the manufacturing of work and casual shoes. Rockport is quite popular in many markets around the world, including the US and many Asian markets such as Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.
“The key target customers of Rockport footwear are metropolitan professionals, who are growing in both number and sense of style. The opening of Rockport’s first store in Bangkok serves as a solid foothold for the footwear brand from the US to conquer the Thai market,” Chukiat said.
He said one of the strong points of Rockport in Thailand was its retail price, currently set at between Bt2,900 and Bt5,000 per pair, which is about 15 per cent lower than in other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.