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Vajor and The Label Life on their click to brick journey

By Satarupa Chakraborty | June 24, 2019

Preeta Sukhtankar, Founder, The Label Life and Natasha AR Kumar, Founder, Vajor speak to Retail4Growth on their online-offline sales distribution, about why stores matter and on their learnings in the click-to-brick transition.

the label lifeEmbarking on their retail journey through the online channel and later stepping on to the brick and mortar space, Vajor and the Label Life, both a few stores old, are now poised for rapid expansion. Preeta Sukhtankar, Founder, The Label Life and Natasha AR Kumar, Founder, Vajor speak to Retail4Growth on their online-offline sales distribution, about why stores matter and on their learnings in the click-to-brick transition. 

Tell us about your physical store network

Preeta: We have stores in Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata. In our expansion plan, while we are eyeing all top 10 markets, cities like Indore, Ahmedabad etc surprisingly emerged as promising markets.

Natasha: As of now, we have 4 stores across Delhi, Bangalore, Pune and Chennai. We will soon open in Pune and planning major store expansion across the country.

What would be your online- offline sales ratio and what kind of parity do you target to bring in?

Preeta: Right now, barely 5-7% of our sales is generated from offline. However, it’s notable that certain stores are giving us bigger-than-expected business. For example, our 500 sq ft Mumbai store is generating a revenue of Rs 25-30 lakhs a month and that’s not bad! Moving forward, we target 30% of our overall business to come from offline channel.

Natasha: Interestingly, I have a whopping 65-70% business coming from offline, also because we have more stores and we started our offline journey close to two years back. We don’t have any specific target ratio in mind, however, we want to establish the brand equally well in both our channels.

In this click-to-brick journey, what have been your key learnings and what would be immediate implementations?

Preeta: With our debut store launched just last year in Mumbai, we realized that the space looked too premium, which didn’t commensurate too well with the price point we offered. We had to look more personalized. Therefore, our recently-opened or upcoming stores will have elements like postcards from customers, hashtags etc. We also are planning events to bond with our store customers more deeply.

Natasha: I think that the biggest takeaway in this click-to-brick journey has been the need to get more insights about products and customer feedback. The stores allowed us to interact with our customers directly, which was immensely helpful for us in not only product development, but also in supply chain management and pricing. At the end of the day, if you want to go close to your customer demographics, you can’t simply be just an URL. Also, we have brought our retail design close to our brand ID store after stores and now we are moving towards category expansion. Very recently, we have added men’s wardrobe and there will be more surprises soon.

vajor

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