The Aditya Birla Group on Wednesday launched its `House of Brands’ business – TMRW – to nurture digital fashion and lifestyle brands. TMRW aims to create the country’s biggest portfolio of disruptor direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands a market that’s tipped to hit $100 billion by 2025.
TMRW will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Aditya Birla Fashion & Retail (ABFRL). Prashanth Aluru, formerly of Facebook, will be CEO and co-founder, and in keeping with new-age trends, will hold a small stake in the company. There are plans to attract capital in the venture from sovereign wealth funds and other investors.
The idea is to both build and buy 30-plus brands over the next three years. “Moreover, synergies with the offline brands, too, can be tapped,” persons familiar with the plans said.
Brand experts observed that TMRW would probably be fashioned after Mensa, which was set up by Ananth Narayan, formerly with Myntra. Retail players like Reliance Retail, they pointed out, too, is likely to create D2C brands given many of these have become fairly big thanks to the power of the Internet. Several D2C brands have been able to take on some big established brands to carve a niche for themselves.
By creating a ‘House of Brands’, the group will directly compete with the likes of Mensa Brands, Good Glam, GlobalBees, UpScalio and Evenflow.
The AB group is looking to launch and back new-age digital ventures, and TMRW is a move in this direction. AB Group chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla had said at Davos, about a week back, that the group intends to make some bets in the digital and e-commerce spaces and that these would be calibrated. “Some of these could be in the edtech or health-tech spaces,” Birla had said at the time.
Ashish Dikshit, MD of ABFRL, said the company intends to work to attract “new pools of capital” that are in search of high-growth businesses. TMRW will leverage the existing strengths of the ABFRL ecosystem. The board of ABFRL had recently approved the creation of a wholly-owned subsidiary though no specific quantum of capital has been committed to the business.
Ananth Narayanan, CEO, Mensa, told FE the fashion, beauty and lifestyle categories together are $120 billion in market size in India with gross margins of over 60%.