Urban Ladder, the online furniture retailer, which unlocked its first brick and mortar offline store in Bengaluru last week, plans to spend $10 Million over the upcoming 12–18 Months to install more offline stores in various formats all across the nation. Estabished 5 Years back as a clean e-commerce play, the firm modified its positioning in 2017 after a straggler few years giving in low sales. Now it has plans to start almost 15 brick and mortar stores in the leading Indian metro cities.
“Our store in Bengaluru is the flagship one with 7,500 square feet of area. But we will test with smaller stores of almost 4,000 square feet to 4,500 square feet types. We might be able to start a few more outlets in Bengaluru before we make development in other Indian metro cities,” said CEO and co-founder of Urban Ladder, Ashish Goel. With the beginning of its brick and mortar outlets, the e-commerce anticipates to give a supplementary growth of almost 25% in the first year itself.
The online retailer still makes a major part of its income from its own website, but the firm has been inserting new income channels comprising selling on 3rd party marketplaces such as Flipkart and Amazon. “Income is still going to be boosted by the online platform but we are making efforts to get our omni-channel combination right over the coming 1 year,” Goel claimed to the media. The e-commerce also makes plan to utilize virtual reality and augmented reality to improve the online as well as offline buying experience of users.
Previously this year, the Bengaluru-based firm lifted Rs 102 Crore from current sponsors as it was getting ready for its offline venture. For the financial year 2016–2017, it reported a hammering of Rs 154 Crore on an income of Rs 98 Crore.
Having said this, the e-commerce company seems to have witnessed a huge loss. But now, as it appears to us, the company is planning to spend almost $10 Million in developing more offline store. Hope this might help the company to gain some stability.
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