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Urban Tribe to grow aggressive through shop-in-shop model

By Swaminathan Balasubramanian | January 05, 2018

In an exclusive chat with retail4growth, Chandan Sawera, Founder and Director, and Aditya Iyer, CMO, Backpack International, share their retail expansion plan.

From a bootstrapped start-up of just 5 members about two years ago, Urban Tribe has penetrated the market not just in metros but even in remote towns. Urban Tribe claims that it is a disruptive innovator in the market bringing fresh ideas addressing latent needs that enhances quality of urban commute or short trips. In an exclusive chat with retail4growth, Chandan Sawera, Founder and Director, and Aditya Iyer, CMO, Backpack International, share their retail expansion plan. 

What interested you to venture into backpack bags industry? 

Backpacks on the whole is a INR 9000 cr industry in India with 100% year on year growth. There are many who sell bags, luggage and more. However, for big players, backpack is only about 5% of their business. For us, we ventured into this after analysing the problems faced by 11 crore bike riders in India. 

Tell us about your presence in retail.

We started as a pure-play online brand. This is the third year of operations. We wanted to concentrate only on e-commerce. We are now entering into physical retail stores because we believe that globally offline retail is still dominant. We have recently associated with Central Mall, making our way into retail.  

What are your expansion plans?

We started our stores in Pune and Gurugram through Central Mall. Soon, we will be starting in Bangalore too. We are already in talks with major retailers in the country. We are targeting 100 stores by the end of year in shop-in-shop formats.  We are also looking out for regional players too.

What are the typical store designs?

Our typical store format is 100-400 sq feet, where we have customized retail fixtures. We have a mix of professionals and youngsters entering our stores, so we design our stores, lightings and furniture based on those factors.

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