Women Fashion Brand FabAlley's Parent Firm Raises ₹20.75 Cr Funding from SAIF Partners, India Quotient

High Street Essentials (HSE), the parent company of women's fashion brands FabAlley and Indya, on Saturday said it has raised Rs 20.75 crore in a fresh round of funding led by existing investors, SAIF Partners and India Quotient.

The pre-series C round involves a convertible note, which will be converted during the series C raise, a statement said.

The new round of funding has also seen participation from Abhishek Dalmia and several family offices, it added.

A convertible note is a short-term debt that converts into equity, typically in a future financing round in a startup.

The latest infusion of capital comes shortly after the company had raised Rs 8 crore in venture debt from Trifecta Capital in January this year. The company has raised over Rs 97 crore in equity funding and Rs 13 crore in venture debt.

"The new capital raised will be utilised for expanding the brands' D2C (digital to consumer) footprint with new initiatives such as a subscription-based shopping experience, and catalogue curation with AI-based recommendations based on customers' affinity and data mining," the statement said.

To address the current situation, the company has also ventured into new categories such as fashion masks, lounge-wear, and formal keyboard-up dressing options.

HSE's Indya brand has seen massive online growth internationally during the last fiscal year, which will be harnessed further by adding localised offers, currencies, and payment methods, the statement said.

Started in 2012 by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik, HSE has scaled up its retail footprint in FY20 with 13 new Indya stores and five FabAlley stores, along with expanding both brands to over 400 shop-in-shops across the country.

"In the midst of this unprecedented global crisis, we are working hard to ensure that we leverage all our assets such as our nimble supply chain, data-led designing and sharp focus on customer experience so that HSE emerges as a leading fashion retail company in the industry," Poddar said.

HSE reported net revenue of Rs 90.2 crore in FY19, with a net profit of Rs 1.3 crore. PTI SR

Women-centric Online Fashion Brands Faballey & Indya Raises ₹60 Cr from SAIF Partners

Noida-based High Street Essentials (HSE), which owns women-centric fashion brands, FabAlley and Indya, have raised Rs 60 crore in a Series B funding from SAIF Partners.

This round of funding also includes a partial secondary share sale by Indian Angel Network (IAN), which was early investor in the startup. IAN had invested undisclosed amount as seed fund in Faballey, in November 2013.

With latest round of funding, HSE, which is led by women founders, has raised a total of about $11.3 million in funding over four rounds, including this one. The latest is the third round funding by the startup, which last raised its Series A funding from India Quotient in October 2016 and a round of debt from Trifecta Capital earlier this year.

The startup intends to use the fresh funding towards increasing distribution, product expansion, brand-building and strengthening its technology.

Founded in 2012, by Tanvi Malik and Shivani Poddar, who quit their high-paying jobs in Titan Industries, Unilever and Avendus Capital, HSE had started FabAlley as a highly curated women-centered accessories only store. It then grown to become brand of globally trendy apparel and accessories both, and all of which designed in-house.

In 2016, HSE launched 'Indya', a second by company that offers contemporary Indian wear with modern and distinctive Indo-western elements for the women-centric market.

The company claims to have turned profitable in FY18 with gross sales of Rs 80 crore and said it was on track to close FY19 at Rs 150 crore, while remaining Ebitda positive.

“The capital infusion will help us scale our offline presence rapidly from 15 exclusive outlets and 120 shop-in-shops to 50 and 300, respectively, by the end of FY20. We will invest in Athleisure and our plus size brand, Curve. We will also look at amplifying our brands” said Shivani Podda.

Tanvi Malik added “Our goal is to capture both online and offline growth opportunities by leveraging our channel-agnostic approach through phygital store experiences, virtual fitting rooms, seamlessly merged forward and reverse logistics – all aimed at benefitting from the strategic advantages of both channels, while minimising their inherent disadvantages.”

Recent Funding Led By SAIF Partner

SAIF Partners, which is a Hong Kong-based venture and growth capital fund, had recently led a $3.3 million Series A round of funding of IIT Madras incubated Internet of Things (IoT) Startup, DeTect Technologies, in last month.

In October, SAIF had also led a $3.1 million funding of Meesho, a Bengaluru-based social e-commerce startup backed by Y Combinator. Prior to this, in September this year, SAIF led a Series A round of funding worth $2 million of Sensehawk, a Bangalore and California-based startup that performs data analysis from autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Drones.

Source - Financial Express

Fashion Brand FabAlley Raises $2M in Series A Round Led by India Quotient

Noida-based online fashion store FabAlley has raised $2 million in its Series A round of funding led by India Quotient with participation from its existing investors - Indian Angel Network and social entrepreneur Ranjan Sharma. The company aims to utilize the newly raised funding to expand its offline reach and scale up its product offerings. It will also be used for marketing and brand management.

Online-to-offline fashion platform, FabAlley was founded in 2012 by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik. FabAlley which currently retails via Central, Future Group’s fashion chain, has about 25 live stores with Central and 45 more in the pipeline. "We will be wrapping up (expansion of our Central stores) by Jan 2017," Tanvi Malik, cofounder of FabAlley said, reported ET.

"We will be expanding to categories such as lingerie and fitness wear. We will also expand our accessories portfolio to include bags, shoes, fashion jewellery as well as grow our 2 sub brands — Curve & Indya," added Malik.

Speaking about the investment, Madhukar Sinha, partner at India Quotient said, "Eventually, to reach scale you have to be present everywhere; on your own website, marketplaces and offline stores. We believe that it will be much more capital-efficient than some of the pure offline stores or brands."

Other startups which operates in the fashion retail segment are StalkBuyLove, Findow, Voonik, Fynd, Purplle and Roposo among others. Earlier last month, StalkBuyLove raised an undisclosed amount of funding from William Bissell, Managing Director of ethnic retailer Fabindia and in the same month Findow also received an undisclosed amount of funding from Raj Singh Bhandal, Director, Next Media Works.

Online Fashion Brand FabAlley.com Raises Funding From Indian Angel Network

FabAlley.com, an online-only fashion brand exclusively for women, has raised an undisclosed amount of investment in Seed Funding from India’s first and Asia’s largest angel network, Indian Angel Network (IAN). IAN investor members Mohit Goyal and Tushar Singh led this round of investment.

Launched in June 2012 by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik, FabAlley offers design-differentiated and fashion forward clothing and accessories for the trendy woman on-the-go. The USP of the brand is identifying and interpreting global fashion trends for the modern Indian woman into highly affordable apparel, jewellery, accessories, shoes and bags. The portal also offers unique features which simplify and energise the consumer's shopping experience - such as shop by trends, by budget and by occasion. The latest innovation from the FabAlley stables is a customised, subscription based Jewelbox, the first of its kind in India.

Since FabAlley is a comprehensive fashion destination, its strength vests in its fashion blog which aims at increasing style awareness by providing fashion bytes, trend reports, style tips and street style beats. An interactive fashion quiz which allows consumers to determine their unique style personality and browse the site accordingly, also forms a significant section of the portal.

FabAlley plans to use the investment raised to increase its manufacturing & merchandising strength by adding new categories in both apparel & accessories and increasing depth in existing categories. It also plans to use the investment to improve its technology, supply chain capabilities, warehousing and marketing. Apart from that, FabAlley will rebrand and re-launch its fashion blog in a big way with more interactive features and in-depth fashion coverage.

Tushar Singh, an IAN investor member who will be joining the FabAlley board said, "Change in consumer lifestyle, supported by altered consumer mindset has given a boost to the e-commerce business. Indian consumers have matured over the years and their increased acceptance for making online transactions has thus widened the potential e-commerce owing to acceptance of online shopping as a safe shopping medium. Tanvi and Shivani make an excellent team and we would be delighted to help them scale up FabAlley."

"It’s a rare team to have the kind of depth of design, manufacturing, merchandising and customer acquisition that we saw in the Faballey team. And leveraging e-commerce will help them scale up even faster", said Mohit Goyal, an investor member.