Craftsvilla to venture into offline space with first brick-and-mortar store in Mumbai

Craftsvilla, one of India’s largest online ethnic store, is going the Omnichannel way. The brand is opening its first exclusive brick-and-mortar outlet in Mumbai come November.
In an exclusive interview with Indiaretailing’s Charu Lamba, Co-founder, Craftsvilla, Manoj Gupta said, “This year we are going Omnichannel. We are launching our own stores and also we are planning to open shop-in-shops in large format stores like Central, Lifestyle, Pantaloons and Reliance Trends by next quarter. All the brands will be available offline and online. We have also listed our brands on Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra.”
He further revealed, “Craftsvilla’s first store will open in Mumbai in November. Spread across 800-1,000 sq.ft. retail space, the store will be focussing only on Craftsvilla products.”
The ethnicwear major is also planning on opening bigger stores spread across 2,000 sq.ft plus area, where it will house all its brands including Jharokha, Anuswara, Mirwasa and Craftsvilla. These stores will be opened in the later part of next year.
“In the next two years, we are eyeing 2 lakh sq.ft. of retail space across general trade, large format stores and own stores. It is too early to say anything about how the area will be divided,” said Gupta.
“We are starting with Maharashtra as it is a big consumption state and then we are planning to go to South in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and then Delhi in the North. We are yet to create a formal strategy of location,” he further added.
Private Labels
Craftsvilla has two lines of business – one is online marketplace where the brand entertain sellers across ethnic space i.e Craftsvilla.com and other is their brand business where they are creating their own brands.
“And the reason for creating our brands is primarily because there is an immense opportunity in the ethnic space. We found opportunity in handloom. Handloom is a huge market but completely there is no brand, no one is collecting products and saying this is what I stand for. So we created Jharokha as our handloom brand. Similarly in authentic craft space, Mirwasa, which is our other brand, is about authentic craft apparels like kalamkari, chickenkari etc.”
Craftsvilla is also launching another brand called Sutva which is a premium ethnic embellished wedding brand.
“Apart from this, we are launching a few brands in the home and jewellery segments, but they will be coming the next year around January or February,” said Gupta.
The brand, which has close to 5 million SKUs and 35,000 registered sellers, delivers to around 40,000 pin codes in the country.
Craftsvilla is targeting 300-400 per cent growth this fiscal and looking forward to focus more on men’s category which is an under-served market and also push Craftsvilla kids starting next year.