After Roadster, Myntra plans retail outlets for beauty vertical

Having offline footprints has been a key priority of online players. And, fashion e-tailer Myntra seems to have several plans to ramp up its offline presence. After announcing the brick & mortar store for its private label brand Roadster, the company plans to open up multiple outlets to retail beauty and cosmetic products in mall and shopping complexes across cities.

Myntra first offline cosmetic outlet will come in Bengaluru and likely to follow the model of personal care and beauty stores retail chain Sephora. With Myntra Beauty offline stores, the Flipkart-owned company would essentially compete with Body Shop, Colorbar, Lotus, Lakme and Nykaa amongst several others.

Ever since the beginning of this year, Myntra has been doubling down its offline foray. Besides opening two stores for Roadster in Bengaluru, the company also manages franchise stores of Spain’s clothing brand Mango.

Additionally, Myntra had won rights to manage international fashion brand Esprit offline stores in India. The company sees the offline channel as a complementary avenue to online channel and way of spreading the reach of its brand.

To strengthen its omnichannel strategy, Myntra recently had acquired Petr, a Mumbai based end-to-end omnichannel platform for offline retailers.

Besides Myntra, Amazon, furniture and home decor e-tailers - UrbanLadder and Pepperfry including eyewear platform Lenskart and beauty etailer Nykaa have also been leveraging offline studio and outlets to drive sales.

Meanwhile, Myntra had reportedly hit a monthly GMV run rate of about Rs 1200 to Rs 1400 crore in the month June (during EORS). With spike in GMV run rate, the company expects to close the current financials at about $2 billion in gross sales.

The company is also projected to turn profitable in the previous fiscal with a combination of strong topline and sound unit economics. Myntra is yet to file financials for FY18.

While likes of Myntra and other online players have been focusing on offline channel aggressively, past experiments by brands such as YepMe and Freecultr had backfired. They failed to entice customers through offline channels and eventually ceased operations.

The development was first reported by ET.