V-Mart Retail, Unlimited’s e-commerce portals to be merged with LimeRoad: CMD Lalit Agarwal

Value fashion retailer V-Mart Retail plans to merge its online shopping platforms for V-Mart and Unlimited with recently acquired LimeRoad, the company’s chairman and managing director Lalit Agarwal told Moneycontrol.

According to the CMD, the newly-acquired platform’s digital expertise will be used by the company to get a foothold in the e-commerce channel, and all V-Mart and Unlimited products will be available from LimeRoad in the future.

“Digital commerce is seeing widespread adoption by customers. The channel will be a part of the lifestyle and shopping habit of every consumer. In the last three years, we have tried to develop our internal tools and internal technology to catch up to this trend. But we were not able to grow at the required speed and were not able to generate volumes,” said Agarwal.

“Hence we thought it important to acquire a brand with knowledge of technology and digital consumers.”

The value fashion retailer currently generates less than 5 percent of its sales from e-commerce as a channel.

V-Mart Retail, which operates about 410 stores primarily in tier II, III, and IV markets, acquired fashion marketplace LimeRoad on October 17. The company had last year also acquired 74 stores of retail brand Unlimited from Arvind Lifestyle Brands in South and West India.

According to Agarwal, V-Mart Retail paid Rs 67 crore towards LimeRoad’s liabilities and another Rs 100 crore will be invested in scaling up the brand.

This is a comedown for the e-commerce platform which in its heyday had raised about $50 million from top investors such as Tiger Global, Lightspeed etc.

“LimeRoad pre-Covid was generating good volumes and turnover but post-Covid the company had trouble with fundraising and was facing challenges in marketing. We feel, however, that the company has huge growth potential,” Agarwal said.

The e-commerce platform, said V-Mart in a press statement, currently has about 1.7 crore registered users and generates more than 50 percent of its sales from women consumers. V-Mart Retail plans to tap this strength to increase its share of sales to women consumers. V-Mart Retail, as per Agarwal, generates about 80 percent of its sales from apparel, of which 22 percent is contributed by women, 27 percent by kids’ wear, and 37 percent by men’s wear.