ICICI Venture, with historical AUM since 2002 of over US $4.25 billion spread across 4 business verticals, has announced that it has executed definitive agreements to invest Rs 100 crore in Go Fashion India Private Limited, the company that owns popular women’s bottom wear brand, Go Colors.
This marks the fifth investment from ICICI Venture’s 4th PE fund, India Advantage Fund Series 4. This investment is ICICI Venture’s first retail apparel investment in the past decade.
Located in Chennai, Go Colors was founded in 2011 by Gautam Saraogi and Prakash Saraogi with a unique vision to create a women focused legwear brand offering a wide range of high quality products with very high levels of comfort, durability and fit, across categories like Churidars, Leggings, Jeggings, denim and linen legwear products.
Go Colors is the leading women legwear brand in India and has significant countrywide presence with a network of more than 200 Exclusive Branded Outlets and presence in over 500 large format stores. The promoters of the company have two decades of experience in apparel industry as one of the leading exporters.
Prashant Purker, Managing Director & CEO of ICICI Venture said, “Go Colors operates in a highly unorganised high growth market of women’s leg wear with increasing consumer preference for organised retail and secular movement towards branded offerings in this evolving category. We believe that with good tailwinds and first mover advantage in this category, Go Colors is well positioned to scale up its business and capture the market growth.”
As per estimates, the bottomwear market is expected to grow at 20-25 per cent per annum. “This investment reflects our focused approach for backing high growth opportunities with strong and secular movement towards organised markets, backing emerging companies in evolving categories and partnering with experienced management teams with demonstrated execution capabilities,” Purker added.
Go colors has demonstrated strong execution capabilities by successfully ramping up and reaching out to the consumers by achieving a 200 store presence in a short period of time.
Gautam Saraogi, CEO at Go Fashion Pvt Ltd said, “Go Colors today is a prominent brand in the women’s legwear segment with increasing popularity amongst its target consumer base. With two respected partners – ICICI Venture and Sequoia India – we are poised to achieve our vision of becoming the brand of choice for women’s legwear in India. We are also aggressively implementing technology to enhance our customer experience and take the brand to its next level of growth.”
Through this investment of Rs 1 billion, ICICI Venture is partnering with Go Colors to capture the huge market potential by ramping up the store expansion and build a successful women legwear brand.
