For most part of the last year, we’ve been hearing that Myntra is planning to set up offline stores. But, we didn’t witness any positive development in this department until today. The Flipkart-owned online fashion portal has now confirmed that it will be entering offline retail space with Spanish fashion label ‘Mango’.
With regards to this, Myntra has already acquired the rights to manage brick-and-mortar stores of Mango in India, along with exclusive rights for online retailing as well.
Currently, there are eight Mango outlets in India from current franchisees Major Brands and DLF Brands, which will now be acquired by Myntra. It’ll now manage the omni-channel strategy of the global fashion brand.
DLF Brands had acquired the franchise for Mango in 2011 with an agreement to expand and open new stores in India. In the past, DLF Brands has already exited its joint ventures with Italian fashion houses Giorgio Armani and Salvatore Ferragamo.
Talking about this initiative, Ananth Narayanan, CEO of Myntra and Jabong, said,
We are very excited to be the first e-commerce company to be awarded these exclusive rights by a leading global fashion brand such as Mango. This agreement… is in line with our strategy to provide our customers access to the best of international brands. We expect to grow Mango’s India business exponentially over the next 5 years.
This will be in a hybrid model between a sub franchisee and retail managed purely by Myntra. In the next six months we will finalise the entire offline deal. The aim is to kick start pre-Diwali.
While Ananth has revealed several details about this offline initiative, but he has refused to shed light on financials, including expenses for offline stores.
Shefali Singh, Vice President of International Business at Myntra will be spearheading this new initiative. The fashion portal is aiming to open around 25-30 Mango stores over the next five years.
The company will focus exclusively on women’s wear in the first two years and later roll out men’s and kids category in the offline stores. Earlier, Myntra tried to acquire the store network of U.S. brand Forever 21, but lost them to Aditya Birla Group.
In addition, Myntra is also planning to build an offline presence for its private labels, and a Roadster outlet is due to launch early next month. The store will be opened under Myntra’s private brand Roadster in swish shopping district of 100 Feet Road. For the Roadster outlet, Blackberry’s apparel store on 100 Feet Road in Indira Nagar has carved out a 3,500 sq ft space out of its total 8000 sq ft.
According to Ananth Narayan, CEO of Myntra, “it will be a highly tech-enabled store.” He has also confirmed that the outlet would have digital walls, allowing consumers to navigate and browse products. However, the company has not revealed any concrete timeline.
