Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

Purplle.com, an online portal that sells beauty and makeup products, has decided to change it business model from online-only to omni-channel. With this, it will now open five stores in Mumbai by the end of this financial year.

The company will sell its exclusively licensed products through these offline stores. It will also help the customers to place orders in-store for home delivery based on their needs and requirements. The platform is currently having 11 to 12 exclusive brands, which accounts for nearly 20 percent of its sales.

Commenting on the development, Manish Taneja, co-founder of Purplle, said,

We are looking to open five offline stores in Mumbai this year with an investment of about Rs 15 lakh per store. We are also looking at opening kiosks in malls and other areas where we are unable to get a proper location.

However, the five stores are the part of the company’s pilot project. Depending on this pilot, the company plans to open more stores in other cities of the nation.

While the company has enough financial resources, it may look for additional capital after January in order to help scale up its operations. Manish Taneja says that they are expecting to achieve break even by December this year.

Purplle.com has a large number of products with 50,000 SKUs across 650 brands. It has 300 beauty specific sellers who act like an extended business development arm enabled by a strong technology and data backbone.

To ensure that its quality and delivery is maintained, it provides all warehousing and logistics services to sellers. Purplle claims to have clocked approximately ₹300 crore in gross sales with no single brand contributing to more than 5 percent of the total.

Many startups that were started as with a business model of online-only, and have now expanded to the offline stores as well in order to capture larger market. Such startups include furniture seller UrbanLadder, fashion maketplace Myntra, lingerie retailer Zivame, lens startup Lenskart, among others.

Purplle is an online store that sells cosmetics, fragrances, and skin and hair care products. It was founded by Manish Taneja and Rahul Dash in 2011. So far, the company has raised more than ₹41.5 crore in 4 funding rounds from 7 investors, including JSW Ventures and IvyCap ventures, among others.

By Jeet