 "Yuvraj aims Rs 100-cr clothing line business")
After investing in a slew of start-ups via his company YouWeCan Ventures, cricketer Yuvraj Singh is now launching his own clothing line YWC. The brand would concentrate on athletics or sports-inspired wear.
The cricketer hopes his new brand would be worth Rs 100 crore in the next three years. "It would be an athletic fashion clothing line for men, women and children. While 70 per cent would be men's fashion the rest would be women's. The brand foresees to close somewhere around Rs 25-30 crore in topline in the current financial year and we see it becoming a Rs 100 crore brand in three years," Singh told Business Standard.
"We are confident the brand would find takers both offline as well as online. I am not worried about sales, I am confident about the line-up and am pretty sure sales will pick up. Last two years, we have done a lot of R&D on fashion and we know we have a great line-up."
The brand would be available offline and as well as online. YWC merchandise will be sold by online fashion major Myntra and its own online ecommerce portal YWC.com.
Myntra has a long list of celebrity fashion brands that it sells on its portal. Celebrities such as Virat Kohli, Deepika Padukone and Hrithik Roshan have their clothing lines available on Myntra. The Flipkart-owned fashion portal had earlier said it would be expanding its celebrity line-up and bringing in more niche fashion. The company, which recently bought Jabong, has also inherited its range of celebrity-owned or endorsed fashion brands.
Singh said the company planned to sell via multi-brand outlets, regional chain stores from mid September. In the first phase, it plans to sell through 25 to 30 stores throughout India.
Other than the metropolitans, the brand would be expanding to tier-II and tier-III towns as well.
"I would be also opening my flagship store in Chandigarh. After seeing the response we would increase the number of flagship stores in the near future," he added.
However, for Singh this clothing line is a means to an end, which is to have a steady stream of funds for his cancer charity foundation YouWeCan. "The idea came out of me looking for ways to fund my NGO. That would be the sole purpose of the clothing lineup," he said.
Singh was one of the first few players to invest in the startup wave, however for now he wants to take it easy on that front. His company Youwecan Ventures has invested in 10 companies including Vyomo a mobile app to simplify the way people find and book beauty services, SportyBeans a multi-sport program for preschoolers and JetSetGo, an online marketplace for private jet and helicopter charter flights.
He had also made a seed investment in former Housing CEO Rahul Yadav's venture - Intelligent Interfaces - which aimed to improve efficiency in governance.
