Scaling up brand Masaba

After having picked up stakes in Shantanu & Nikhil, Tarun Tahiliani and Sabyasachi Mukherjee, ABFRL has announced a strategic partnership with Masaba Gupta.

By Bhakti Chuganee
New Update
Scaling up brand Masaba

Corporate India is serious about helping Indian fashion designers. After having picked up stakes in designers Shantanu & Nikhil, Tarun Tahiliani and Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd. (ABFRL) has announced a strategic partnership with fashion designer Masaba Gupta. The company has entered into a Binding Term sheet to acquire 51 per cent stake in the entity to build a gen-next focused fashion and lifestyle business under the contemporary brand “Masaba.” According to Ashish Dikshit, MD, ABFRL, this fits in well with the company’s overall strategy to partner India’s top most designers to build a portfolio of distinctive and aspirational home-grown brands across fashion and lifestyle categories.

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"The House of Masaba already has established a strong foothold among the youth with a robust digital-first strategy. The tie-up with ABRFL will strengthen this position, making the brand future ready," says Masaba Gupta.

“As a new generation of young and digitally native consumers explore their needs within fashion and lifestyle, they actively seek brands that are colourful, vivid and digital. Masaba is a young, effervescent brand with a refreshing and innovative take on every lifestyle category,” says Ashish Dikshit, MD, ABFRL. “This partnership is also an important step in building presence in the fast-growing beauty and personal care segment,” he adds.

The aim of this partnership is to create a young, aspirational and digital-led portfolio play, across the affordable luxury segment in the fashion, beauty and accessory categories. Brand “Masaba” will be scaled mainly through the digital direct to consumer (D2C) channel, leveraging its strong connect with younger and digitally influenced consumers. The brand will straddle across the entire lifestyle offerings ranging from apparel, accessories, beauty and other lifestyle products.

For ABFRL, this partnership also marks the company’s entry into the beauty and personal care market in India, which offers tremendous opportunity to build distinctive, scalable home-grown brands. This is a rapidly growing segment driven by an increase in women shoppers, rise in disposable incomes and acceleration in digital influence.

The brand is targeting to achieve annual revenues of around Rs500 crore in the next five years. Plans are to introduce multiple product extensions bringing cosmetics, personal care, athleisure and home decor to its portfolio. “As a young, home-grown brand I am delighted to partner with ABRFL to further solidify the House of Masaba into a 360-degree, global lifestyle brand of the future,” says Masaba Gupta, founder, House of Masaba. “The House of Masaba already has established a strong foothold among the youth with a robust digital-first strategy, and the tie-up with ABRFL will strengthen this position, making the brand future ready. With this partnership, I look forward to creating immersive and collaborative experiences for our target audiences who highly engage in virtual mediums today, and are driving the industry’s evolution to the Metaverse,” she adds.

The proposed acquisition is subject to signing of definitive agreements, completion of closing conditions precedent to be set out in the definitive agreements and statutory approvals, if any.