Anjana Reddy's Universal Sportsbiz uses celebrities to build apparels

USPL has combined celebrity appeal with good assortment and marketing

Mumbai-based Sonia Kulkarni, a working woman in her late-20s, likes to buy clothes from a multi-brand store like Shoppers Stop, where she can touch, feel and try them before buying. On her last three visits, she has picked a casual wear brand Imara for its superior ‘‘hand-feel".
 

Endorsed by actor Jacqueline Fernandez, Imara is sold by Bengaluru-based start-up Universal Sportsbiz Pvt Ltd (USPL), which recently raised Rs 1 billion from VC firms Accel and Alteria Capital. USPL also sells Wrogn, a casual wear men’s line in association with cricketer Virat Kohli, and Ms. Taken, a western wear line in a tie-up with actor Kriti Sanon.

It has combined celebrity appeal with good assortment and marketing. This has helped USPL scale faster and raise six rounds of funding. The latest fundraise values USPL at $160 million (or Rs 12 billion, four times its estimated top line of Rs 3 billion for FY19). Reddy feels all three — Imara, Wrogn and Ms. Taken — have the potential to be multi-million brands.

“The company has added tremendous value through its differentiated brands and as it moves forward to accelerate growth, we are excited to strengthen our partnership with them,” said Mahendran Balachandran, partner at Accel, which has also backed Flipkart and Facebook.

Anjana Reddy

Anjana Reddy, the eldest child of Vinayak Ravi Reddy, the vice chairman of family-run media house Deccan Chronicle Holdings, was a badminton player but an injury forced her to give it up. While pursuing her masters in the US, she came across the National Football League, and founded Collectabillia in 2012, an e-tailing platform to source and sell sports memorabilia and autographed merchandise of iconic players like Sachin Tendulkar, who also acquired a stake in her company.

Despite a good run when Tendulkar retired in 2013, Reddy figured out early that merchandising was a different ball game in India as compared to the US. “It was always seen as a free giveaway. The habit of buying merchandise doesn’t exist here,” she told Forbes India in 2017. In 2014, she pivoted and entered the fashion brands space, leveraging the allure of celebrities to the youth. 

Opportunity

The market that Reddy’s USPL is targeting is worth $70 billion and expected to grow to $110 billion by 2020. When USPL launched men’s line Wrogn in November 2014 and women’s line Imara the next year, there were few brands that targeted the youth. ‘‘We wanted to be a youth-focused brand, by-the-youth, for-the-youth,’’ says Reddy, who was 26 when she launched the clothing lines four years back. In 2016, the company launched Ms. Taken.

While the Indian fashion space is dominated by retailers like Arvind, Aditya Birla Group, Reliance Retail and Future Lifestyle Fashions, USPL has to compete with e-tailers like Myntra, Limeroad and offline brands such as Biba and W. In the past couple of years, there’s been a surge in celebrity-led brands entering the apparel market. 

There are Just F from Jacqueline, Prowl from Tiger Shroff, Shahid Kapoor’s Skult, Sonam and Rhea Kapoor’s Rheson, Anushka Sharma’s Nush and Hrithik Roshan’s HRX. Most of them are in the fitness and athleisure, or active wear, space, and don’t compete with USPL’s brands. USPL’s top line has grown 30 per cent a year.

Marketing mix

Celebrity associations can help in brand building and turn profits faster but only if the product and assortment is good. Reddy ensures this with an in-house design team but outsources production, which is common in apparels. As apparels are open to the vagaries of season, the design team uses a lot of data on what has worked and what has not. 

For a wider reach, it has adopted an omnichannel strategy. It has key offline and online channel partners in Shoppers Stop, Myntra and Flipkart, and has added 60 exclusive stores. ‘‘Fashion is extremely personal. Customers want to touch and feel, so access is important. You, too, be there where the customers are,’’ says Reddy. 

She feels customers have a lot of choices, and both online and offline is important. 

Despite celebrity associations, the clothes don’t burn a hole in customer’s pockets. When Imara was launched, it was 23 per cent cheaper than other brands with similar positioning. The positioning is smart premium or mass premium, where an Imara is pitted against the likes of W and Biba, while Wrogn is pitched against US Polo.

Imara sells for Rs 1,500 to Rs 1,600, Wrogn retails at Rs 1,700 to Rs 1,800, while Ms. Taken operates in the Rs 1,200-Rs 1,600 range. "If you get two or three things like product, pricing, and distribution right, everything else can be taken care of,’’ says Reddy. Celebrities can charge licensing fees of 1-12 per cent, but she has kept them down. It takes five years for an apparels business to break even; USPL hopes to be there by this fiscal year.

Road ahead 

USPL hopes to be a Rs 10 billion company in the next three years, after achieving sales of Rs 1 billion this year. To get there, it plans to scale its distribution threefold to 1,500 points of sale, from 500 today. These include all online and offline channels, large format stores. It has 60 exclusive brand outlets, which are its flagship stores; it plans to add 40 more of them in a year or two.

EXPERT TAKE: Spotting right celebrity,  identifying niches are the key 

Technopak Advisors president, Saloni Nangia 

The celebrity-endorsed fashion business is very nascent in India, with just a couple of companies focused on this space currently. I would like to congratulate Anjana for identifying this opportunity and starting early. The combination of youth icons, their fashion, aspirational (yet affordable) pricing, e-commerce and brick & mortar, and a focus on creating brands works well. I guess you can’t resist saying that everything’s going right for Wrogn!
 

As the business scales up, there will be the usual challenges faced by a fashion business, including increasing competition from more youth-centric brands. A couple would be more pronounced when associated with celebrities. Creating a product range which is differentiated and connect with the consumer beyond only the celebrity’s style will be important, as there is a limited time window for celebrities or they might have an erratic career graph (though fortunately neither are true for Virat Kohli). Reinventing the business continually and staying ahead of the curve — be it spotting right celebrities early on or identifying niches — would be the key.