High Street Essentials raises Rs 25.5 crore from Elevation Capital & Others
Elevation Capital, India Quotient, Dominor Holding, and family offices led a Rs 25.5 crore funding round for High Street Essentials (HSE), which owns the FabAlley and Indya brands.
The omnichannel women's apparel retailer is valued at about $75 million in the transaction.
“We had offers from other external investors too, but we refused it as we do not need more capital at this point of time,” said co-founder Shivani Poddar.
Its offline business will be back to normal in a quarter, while online sales are expected to pick up by June, she added.
HSE will use the funds to expand the brands’ direct-to-consumer footprint both in India and abroad. This will be done by adding more personalised solutions to proprietary web and app products and expanding.
The new funding comes after the company received Rs 20.75 crore in June 2020. The company also received Rs 8 crore in venture debt from debt fund Trifecta Capital earlier this year.
High Street Essentials Private Limited is an unlisted private company incorporated on 19 January 2012 by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik. It is classified as a private limited company and is located in Uttar Pradesh. HSE is a fast-fashion retailer with an omnichannel retail model.
During the first Covid-19 wave last year, the company experimented with new categories such as fashion masks, loungewear, and formal keyboard-up dressing choices.
The fashion house entered the personal care market earlier this year with the launch of Indya Skin Care, an in-house brand. Earthen by Indya, an Indian daywear brand, was also added to the company's portfolio.
“Over the course of 2020, HSE heavily strengthened its digital presence with new initiatives such as a subscription-based shopping experience, and catalogue curation with AI-based recommendations based on customers’ affinity and data mining,” the company said in a statement.
By partnering with foreign marketplaces including Namshi, Amazon US, and Zalora, it expanded its global presence. Overall, HSE's online presence has grown in the last year.
Online sales now accounts for more than half of the company's overall revenue.
Poddar predicted that the company would record gross sales of around Rs 250 crore for the financial year ending March 31, 2022, despite a revenue decline the previous year.
It plans to make its supply chain more flexible by in-housing key manufacturing processes like printing and embroidery, allowing for a 30-day mind-to-market production turn-around, comparable to global fashion leaders like Zara and Boohoo, according to the company.
“Over the course of the past year, we have worked extremely hard as a team by adopting strict cost-cutting measures, further leveraging our nimble supply chain, improving D2C customer experience, expanding into low capital-intensive channels, and foraying into recession-proof categories in fashion and beauty so that HSE further solidifies its position as a leading women's lifestyle and fashion retail company in the industry,” co-founder Malik said.
The omnichannel women's apparel retailer is valued at about $75 million in the transaction.
“We had offers from other external investors too, but we refused it as we do not need more capital at this point of time,” said co-founder Shivani Poddar.
Its offline business will be back to normal in a quarter, while online sales are expected to pick up by June, she added.
HSE will use the funds to expand the brands’ direct-to-consumer footprint both in India and abroad. This will be done by adding more personalised solutions to proprietary web and app products and expanding.
The new funding comes after the company received Rs 20.75 crore in June 2020. The company also received Rs 8 crore in venture debt from debt fund Trifecta Capital earlier this year.
High Street Essentials Private Limited is an unlisted private company incorporated on 19 January 2012 by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik. It is classified as a private limited company and is located in Uttar Pradesh. HSE is a fast-fashion retailer with an omnichannel retail model.
During the first Covid-19 wave last year, the company experimented with new categories such as fashion masks, loungewear, and formal keyboard-up dressing choices.
The fashion house entered the personal care market earlier this year with the launch of Indya Skin Care, an in-house brand. Earthen by Indya, an Indian daywear brand, was also added to the company's portfolio.
“Over the course of 2020, HSE heavily strengthened its digital presence with new initiatives such as a subscription-based shopping experience, and catalogue curation with AI-based recommendations based on customers’ affinity and data mining,” the company said in a statement.
By partnering with foreign marketplaces including Namshi, Amazon US, and Zalora, it expanded its global presence. Overall, HSE's online presence has grown in the last year.
Online sales now accounts for more than half of the company's overall revenue.
Poddar predicted that the company would record gross sales of around Rs 250 crore for the financial year ending March 31, 2022, despite a revenue decline the previous year.
It plans to make its supply chain more flexible by in-housing key manufacturing processes like printing and embroidery, allowing for a 30-day mind-to-market production turn-around, comparable to global fashion leaders like Zara and Boohoo, according to the company.
“Over the course of the past year, we have worked extremely hard as a team by adopting strict cost-cutting measures, further leveraging our nimble supply chain, improving D2C customer experience, expanding into low capital-intensive channels, and foraying into recession-proof categories in fashion and beauty so that HSE further solidifies its position as a leading women's lifestyle and fashion retail company in the industry,” co-founder Malik said.
