Naaptol offline foray, to invest Rs 10 crore

Home-shopping company Naaptol has earmarked Rs 10 crore for 100 stores over the next year considering the growing omni-channel wave. This comes even as the Mumbai-based company has opened its first store in Thrissur and is on course to open 4 more stores by March 2018.

Manu Agarwal, founder and chief executive of Naaptol said, “We have been getting a lot more demand than what we can serve just on the television medium, so spreading offline made sense. We will look at how trends evolve through our 5 stores by March and then plan the rollout for the next leg of our offline expansion.”

Indore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Jaipur have been identified for the stores set up.

Naaptol has adopted a franchise model for its offline expansion strategy alongside looking to keep its costs on the capex to the minimum.

The company predicts that the offline channel could rejuvenate both Naaptol’s volume growth and its customer base which he hopes to double from 10 million currently within a year.

Agarwal stated, “In the next 3-4 years, we are looking at about 500 stores and at that point, the offline channel will accrue what we currently earn - monthly revenues of about Rs 200 crore.”

Naaptol expects 30% revenues to be generated with this offline arm in the next 3-5 years growing much faster than its e-commerce channel which contributes to only 2% of its revenues currently.