Digital-first brands do not believe in the “slow and steady wins the race” adage. Take travel and lifestyle brand Mokobara, which opened its 12th retail store in Gurugram, Haryana, last week, a year after venturing into physical retail. “Consumer feedback on our products and our online market signalled to us the extent of business we can drive if we were to go offline,” says Apoorv Sharma, retail head, Mokobara.”
Then there is Solethreads, founded in 2020. The digital-first casual footwear brand opened its first store in Mumbai within two years of launch. This year, it plans to add 10 more stores nationwide. “There is a role every channel plays. While digital gives you super quick access to your consumer and validation, since we are building a brand in a category with a high element of physical touch and feel, we need to be present where the customer is. Omnichannel is the way to go,” says Sumant Kakaria, founder of Solethreads.
With low entry barriers, the digital-first format is easier to crack and survive in. In India, there are over 600 or more direct-to-consumer brands with an estimated market size of over $66 billion. But in the last two years, a good number of them — including Akshay Kumar’s Force IX, Hrithik Roshan’s HRX and Superbottoms —have all ventured offline.
So when is the right time for a brand to go offline? “It depends a lot on the category,” says Anand Ramanathan, consumer products and retail sector leader, Deloitte. A company should toy with the idea of marking its physical attendance only after doing a few rounds of funding. “Broadly, `100 crore is what I use as a benchmark. That’s the time when you’ve completed a few rounds of funding and you want to grow faster from that point. And it’s certainly not possible just being online. But if it is electronics, that cut-off will be higher because the prices of products are a lot higher.”
Angshuman Bhattacharya, partner and national leader, consumer product and retail sector, EY Parthenon, says digital brands should look at a physical store as more than just a business expansion. “The stores have a dual purpose. You can have a couple of flagship stores that could serve as a great experience point for the brand.” But the economies kick in only after the first 1,800-2,000 stores, say analysts, by which time “the brand has registered itself in the mind of the consumer”.
Experts reckon it’s time we stopped categorising brands as ‘online’ and ‘offline’ and start considering them as a unified entity. “The ‘divide’ between online and offline is an artificial one. To me, a store is a live, walk-in 360-degree experiential advertisement for a brand in a way that an on-screen presentation can never be,” says Devangshu Dutta, founder and chief executive, Third Eyesight.