Udaan, India’s largest business-to-business e-commerce platform, aims to create over 100 exclusive brands in partnership with small garment manufacturers through its Lifestyle business.
This business comprises clothing, accessories, and footwear.
This move is in line with its vision of empowering small businesses of Bharat (rural India and small towns and cities) through the power of B2B e-commerce.
Bengaluru-based Udaan’s Lifestyle business in the past 12 months has worked and already created over 20 exclusive brands in partnership with small garment manufacturers.
It plans to further scale its operations to have over 50 exclusive brands on its platform in the next one year and over 100 brands in the next few years.
The firm said it has partnered with small businesses to offer best in class quality garments at affordable prices to serve the needs of Bharat.
Vipul Mathur, Head (Exclusive Lines), Lifestyle Business, Udaan
“Over the past one year we have made significant investments to help local garment manufacturers achieve scale and get access to the national market especially in the tier-2 and tier-3 towns and cities of Bharat,” said Vipul Mathur, Head (Exclusive Lines), Lifestyle Business, Udaan. “Our intent is to identify, help scale and create over 100 such exclusive brands from small manufacturing hubs and provide them the technical know-how to achieve growth.”
For the creation of exclusive brands, the ‘in-house’ expert team of Udaan work closely with small garment manufacturers.
It provides them with the requisite expertise of brand creation, content making, product quality improvement and technical know-how to create and sell their garments exclusively on the Udaan platform.
Small manufacturers benefit from this exercise as they get to create their own brand with help from Udaan, which results in the expansion of their business in tier 2 and tier 3 cities and towns.
The small retailers also gain as they get access to high-quality products at the most affordable prices, ultimately benefiting the end consumer of Bharat.
Most of the manufacturers come from major textile hubs spread across tier-2 and tier-3 regions such as Tirupur, Howrah, Ludhiana and Rajkot.
The 20 brands that Udaan helped to create and scale up, were local businesses that had limited reach and penetration.
Today with the help of Udaan, these exclusive brands have been successful in expanding their business.
These businesses have seen a multifold increase and now serve customers nationally.
While there has been strong adoption of the platform by small and medium businesses, even large manufacturers, and brands such as Amul Comfy, maxx, Jockey, Arvind and Shoppers Stop, have also partnered with Udaan. The other such large brands include BIBA, Rangriti, Lifestyle, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, Hummel, Relaxo and Aqualite.
Launched in 2016, Udaan’s lifestyle business has about 4000 brands and sellers and 1.5 lakh operating retailers and buyers.
The segment contributes about 17-20 per cent of Udaan’s overall gross merchandise value (GMV).
