Ronnie Screwvala’s venture capital firm Unilazer Ventures, Lenskart founder Peyush Bansal and redBus founder Phanindra Sama have invested Rs.9 crore in online gadget accessory store DailyObjects, which plans to enter the offline space with the launch of around 100 exclusive and shop-in-shop outlets by February-end.
While three exclusive outlets will be set at the airports of Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, the rest would include shop-in- shop kiosks that will be launched across Delhi and the national capital region surrounding it. In the last couple of weeks, it has already set up five of these outlets in Delhi.
DailyObjects previously raised an undisclosed amount from early stage investment firm Seedfund in 2012.
Peopic Retail Pvt, Ltd, which runs DailyObjects, sells premium cases for smartphones and the MacBook with an average ticket size of Rs.1,500. It now sells only polycarbonate cases and plans to launch leather smartphone and sunglass cases shortly.
“These stores will help us gain more visibility and establish our brand name. Currently when customers see the product online, they think that these are expensive products. We want them to have a touch and feel of the build and the product quality. Only then will they be able to differentiate our products with what are sold in the local markets,” said Pankaj Garg, co-founder and chief executive officer.
DailyObjects works with 60 Indian and foreign artists who design the products and receive a commission for every sale of a product based on their designs. The company currently claims to have 5,500 designs with over 200,000 stock keeping units.
It also sells customized cases for which a user needs to upload an image on the site. Garg said the company gets almost 30% of its business from this segment.
It claims to be selling over 15,000 cases every month, earning Rs.2.25 crore in revenue.
In order to expand its reach, it has also tied up with restaurant discovery platform Zomato to launch Zomato- branded cases.
“We design cases with pictures of things like food items and with the brand name of Zomato. Zomato has a much wider reach; it promotes our cases on its site. We in turn end up getting larger traffic,” said Garg, adding that the company has also been getting orders from overseas after forging the Zomato partnership.
The Delhi-based startup was founded in 2011 by Garg and Saurav Adlakha.
The company competes with Palred Online Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which runs e-commerce venture for tech accessories under the brand name LatestOne. The company last month raised Rs.20 crore from existing investor and parent firm Palred Technologies Ltd.
[“source-Livemint”]
