Over the years, jewellery retailer CaratLane has established its brand pretty well in the digital market. The brand is shifting their focus to offline sales now. By large, jewellery as a category is still dominated by the offline channel given the sentiment and risk associated with the product.
“Our plan is to add 30 offline stores pan India, the earlier focus was on metro cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai but we are also trying to focus on Tier 2 cities as well such as Chandigarh, Dehradun, we are getting queries from Tier 2 cities for opening franchises.” said Prashant Chaudhary, vice-president, CaratLane.
CaratLane is getting fresh demand from more non-metro cities such as Ahmedabad and Pune. The group is all set to launch their second store in Pune. Before launching an offline store, the brand research about the potential in the market. It also sees if there is good demand from that particular city on their online platform.
Currently, 15 per cent demand comes from non-metro cities and the brand sales almost half of their product offline and half of them online, which Chaudhary believes is set to change.
“We see at least 70 per cent contribution coming from the offline business in next 1-2 years as stores will go 3X if we take approximately five months operational running time of each store for a year and has 30 stores more will be operational,” he added.
The online jewellery portal has recently opened their second store in Gurugram. It is targeting to double their business over the year and add more stores across India.
The brand’s strategy is to keep the stores simple and not unnecessarily loaded with stocks. Chaudhary said he is not going to incur heavy investments but he is making sure that customers get the best possible knowledge and experience.
The brand feels it has everything in place and confident enough to expand faster.
BW Reporters
The author is a journalist with BW Businessworld. He primarily covers Retail, Media & Entertainment and Travel & Tourism sectors
