BENGALURU: Brick and mortar fashion retailer Lifestyle on Thursday entered into a strategic partnership with Flipkart to list all of its private label fashion brands on the e-commerce marketplace, according to a top company executive.
Starting Thursday both Flipkart and Myntra customers can browse and make orders across 11 private label brands manufactured by Lifestyle including brands such as Forca, Code, Fame Forever, Nexus, Juniors, Melange and others. Currently, Lifestyle’s private label category include womenswear, menswear, accessories, kidswear, footwear, and bags.
“Lifestyle is present in 44 cities as of now, but through this partnership they can reach to the entire base of Flipkart consumers who are spread across multiple cities in the country. Flipkart customers who may not have access to Lifestyle stores in their geography will now be able to discover products from Lifestyle on Flipkart directly,” said Rishi Vasudev, senior vice president, and group head for fashion at Flipkart.
Vasudev told Mint that both Flipkart and Lifestyle will additionally, explore other omnichannel opportunities such as store pick-ups for online orders, apparel alterations, partnerships around consumer engagements, and loyalty programs among others in the future.
As of now, Flipkart will stock and ship Lifestyle products directly from specialized warehouses. However, Vasudev mentioned that “in case we (Flipkart) witnesses excessive demand (for Lifestyle products) in a certain geography, then we will try and reduce the time taken for the product to reach the customer by shipping it to him or her directly from the closest store rather than a warehouse.”
Having completed 20 years in the industry, Lifestyle currently has a network of 78 stores in India and is growing rapidly by adding one store every 45 days, aiming to have 100 stores within the next two years.
Vasanth Kumar, managing director of Lifestyle International told Mint that currently only 3% of the company’s business comes from its own online e-commerce portal and plans to grow this into double digits in the next 5 years.
“We had launched various digital initiatives like self-checkout (at stores), click and collect (from stores) meant to reduce the pain points faced by consumers from within the stores only. But moving forward in the next 4-5 years, we are aiming to achieve around 15% (sales) from online mediums in the next 5 years, which is possible only through a strategic alliance with the leader” added Kumar in an interview.
As of now, Flipkart claims to have over 160 million users on its platform, offering over 80 million products across over 80 categories. Flipkart claims have partnered with around 14,000 fashion brands (inclusive of small to medium brands and entrepreneurs) while Myntra claims to have partnered with over 2,000 fashion and lifestyle brands till date.
[“source=livemint”]
