Westside Brand Guidelines: Tata’s 1998 Littlewoods Store in Bengaluru & a House of Own Labels

A cosmetics company, one British store and a new name.

Westside began in 1998 with a single store in Bengaluru. According to Trent’s own corporate history, the Tata company behind it was first incorporated as Lakme Limited in December 1952 to make and sell cosmetics, toiletries and perfumes. In 1998 Lakme decided to leave cosmetics for apparel retailing, and in March 1998 it bought Littlewoods International (India) from the British retailer Littlewoods. A Lakme subsidiary, Lakme Exports, was merged with the Littlewoods business and the combined company was named Trent Limited; from July 1998 Trent and Lakme were merged and the Trent name was kept, the company says.

English Wikipedia says the name Trent is a portmanteau of Tata Retail Enterprise, and that Simone Tata, who had chaired Lakme, went on to head the new company. Outlook Business, in a March 2019 profile of Trent, reported that Littlewoods was looking to leave India at the time and had just one store, in Bengaluru; Trent bought it and renamed it Westside. The magazine reported that Noel Tata, then running Tata International, was brought in as chief executive and managing director of Trent, became vice chairman in 2010 and chairman in 2014.

The decision that set the chain’s course came at the start. Littlewoods already sold its own labels, and Trent chose to keep that model rather than run a multi-brand department store. Noel Tata told Outlook Business that private-label retailers abroad were growing faster than multi-brand stores at the time, and that Indian womenswear was then largely unbranded, so the company set about creating its own brands, especially for women. The Tata group’s own newsroom describes an early Westside store in the Hughes Road area of south Mumbai.

Growth was deliberately slow. Outlook Business reported that Westside had 43 stores by the 2010 financial year, adding three or four a year, and had opened 95 stores between 1998 and 2016. It quoted Noel Tata saying the company paid close attention to property and let sites go when it was unsure of them. Most stores were opened in malls, and in 2007 Trent added a franchise route, starting with a Westside store in Mysuru; franchises made up about a tenth of the stores by 2019, the magazine reported.

Nuon, Bombay Paisley, Wardrobe and a Friday drop.

Westside’s identity rests on its labels. Outlook Business reported in 2019 that almost all of Westside’s sales came from its own brands, which then numbered 26 across apparel, footwear, lingerie, cosmetics, perfumes, handbags and home goods. It named womenswear labels Nuon, Bombay Paisley and Wardrobe; menswear labels including ETA, WES and Ascot; and children’s ranges such as Y&F and Hop. Wunderlove covered lingerie and Studio West cosmetics. Stores then ranged from about 8,000 to 34,000 square feet, and each private label had its own head within an in-house design team, the magazine reported.

The Tata group’s newsroom, in a profile written for the chain’s twentieth year, described Bombay Paisley as Indian fusion wear, Wardrobe as office wear, Nuon as a youth label and Gia as a range for plus-size women, alongside Westside Home for furniture and furnishings and Luna Blu for shoes. It quoted Westside’s head of marketing as saying that owning the brands let the chain build each one from design, fabric and production to placement, and bring new lines to the stores every Friday. The same profile described a sequence of internal approvals — a blue seal, a silver seal and a final gold seal — covering pattern, design and colour before a style reaches the shop floor.

The online offer follows the stores. In 2019 Noel Tata told Outlook Business that Westside’s sales on Tata Cliq, the group’s online store, came from the current in-store range at full price, apart from two end-of-season sales a year. In September 2025, at the launch of Westside’s YNG collection, Trent’s managing director Palaniswamy Venkatesalu told Moneycontrol that the online store matched the shops in price and range and avoided flash sales. “It’s not a separate business. It is the brand,” he said.

Trent says Westside is active across the value chain, from design and production to supply chain and stores, and sells clothing, footwear and accessories for women, men and children alongside home furnishings and décor. Its corporate site lists Westside.com, Tata Cliq and Tata Neu as the chain’s online outlets.

How Indian chains present themselves.

India’s large store chains present themselves in quite different ways, and the differences start with where the stores stand. Department-store groups have long followed the shopping mall: afaqs! reported in 2019 that Shoppers Stop had opened a 50,000-square-foot store in Gurugram stocked with premium labels. DMart took the opposite route, Outlook Business reported in 2022, owning the land under its standalone supermarkets rather than leasing space in malls.

The festival calendar shapes the year for these retailers. Shoppers Stop’s first general manager writes in his memoir that the team hurried to name and open the original Andheri store in 1991 so that it could trade before Diwali. Advertising matters as much as the calendar: when Shoppers Stop changed its logo in 2008, afaqs! reported, the new identity arrived with seven commercials, a press campaign and outdoor posters, with creative work by Contract Advertising.

Own labels are a second thread. In August 2025 Indian Retailer reported that Shoppers Stop’s private brands and its value-fashion format, Intune, were growing alongside the third-party brands in its department stores; Forbes India wrote in 2017 that DMart meant to work harder on private labels of its own. Names are often simple phrases: Shoppers Stop’s, the same memoir says, was suggested by a supermarket name seen in Boston.

Most of the larger chains also keep corporate pages that set out their founders, parent groups and stock-exchange listings, since several trade on the BSE and NSE in Mumbai. This guide uses those pages alongside dated press, and marks clearly where a fact rests on the company’s own word.

One of several Trent formats.

Westside is now one of several Trent formats. English Wikipedia says Trent ran only Westside stores until 2004, when it opened its first Star Bazaar hypermarket in Ahmedabad; it formed a joint venture with Inditex to run Zara stores in India in 2009 and opened the first Zudio store in Bangalore in 2016. Moneycontrol described Westside in September 2025 as the Trent brand for the premium segment, with Zudio as its value fashion brand, and reported that as of 30 June 2025 Trent’s portfolio included 248 Westside stores, 766 Zudio stores and 29 stores across other concepts. Trent’s managing director told the site that Westside had begun testing markets outside India, and mentioned Dubai.

The chain has kept adding stores. Storyboard18 reported in October 2026, from Trent’s quarterly update, that the company added 10 Westside stores on a net basis in the quarter to 30 September 2026 and 11 in the first half of its financial year; at that date Trent’s total portfolio across Westside, Zudio and its other brands stood at 1,342 stores.

For a design guide, Westside shows how a single store name can carry a whole house of own labels, each with its own register. Compare Croma, the Tata group’s electronics chain with its own label, and Shoppers Stop, another Mumbai department-store chain. For this guide we use charcoal, terracotta and ivory with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Westside’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.