Online focused brands buying plush stores

NEW DELHI: As rentals fall and queues at premium malls get shorter on account of the pandemic, several online focused brands take up plush stores to make their online foray and expand."A host of players are open to exploring offline retail, an evident reduction in the cost of rentals in offline spaces such as malls has allowed relatively smaller players to make their presence felt," Nippun Aneja of Purplle.com, an online beauty and personal care brand.Melorra, an online jewelry brand, opened three stores at three premium malls in the national capital region - DLF Promenade, DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj; and DLF Avenue, Saket and Vegas Mall, Dwarka. The company which had planned an offline presence before the pandemic, accelerated its plans.“This is the right time to do it, rentals are down, good properties are available now,” said Saroja Yeramilli, founder and chief executive of Melorra.Fashion and lifestyle brand FabAlley which was queued to open its stores in the DLF Mall of India, Noida and Quest Mall in Kolkata started the stores during the pandemic. “We got the space faster,” said Tanvi Malik, Co-Founder, FabAlley and Indya.Several brands, like FableStreet which did not open new stores chose to retain their existing ones during the pandemic.“We also did not exit the existing one that we had opened a year ago. We feel that retail will pick up in the coming months and so will the rentals. So the choice is between retaining it now or fighting for one later,” said Ayushi Gadwani, founder, FableStreet.In the wake of the pandemic, the retail sector and the retailers had to adapt very quickly to the new way of working, said experts.“While online shopping saw a major boom in this period, new brands & startups in this space realized that a physical store goes a long way in improving the customer confidence & experience,” said Anshuman Magazine, Chairman & CEO, India, South East Asia, Middle East & Africa, CBRE, adding that not all new brands and startups were willing to invest large sums of money in creating permanent stores and taking long term liabilities, without knowing how they would manage or fair in this space, he added.The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many of these trends, with e-retail quickly progressing from being a regular habit for a minority of consumers to becoming a new norm of shopping behavior. The quarterly growth in retail space take was up by 79% from Q2 2020 to Q3 2020, Magazine added.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/36Q9Kq1