Melorra founder says offline retail isn't dead, launches three outlets in Delhi

The company plans to launch a few more stores in March in Mumbai and then step up the expansion from April with 30-40 outlets launched across the country by December.

Priyanka Sahay

January 21, 2021 / 21:57 IST

1. Atlas Jewellery India | Return in December 2017: 44.51% | 2016: 23.74% | 2015: 20.66% | Atlas offers a wide range of choice in fashionable jewellery coupled with high standards of purity and service.

Unperturbed by the decline in footfalls of consumers in malls and high streets, Symphony Asia-backed jewellery brand Melorra plans to launch 350 outlets by 2026 with a total investment of $50 million.

The company on January 21 launched three of them in Delhi besides one in Bangalore last month. It plans to launch at least a couple more in March in Mumbai and then step up the expansion from April with 30-40 outlets launched across the country by December.

"I do believe that COVID has accelerated the growth of online businesses ... for the jewellery business we are still talking about 10-20 percent in the coming years being online. There's still a huge market out there that online businesses haven't been to access by being purely online," Saroja Yeramilli, Founder and CEO of Melorra, told Moneycontrol.

"It is not necessary to be offline for trust or touch and feel. These issues are really going down as we speak and will go down more and more as India digitises rapidly. It is just about being wherever the consumer is... I am not one of the people who believes that offline retail is dead," she added.

Melorra last raised $12.5 million in an oversubscribed funding round by Symphony Asia, Lightbox Ventures and Alteria Capital, family offices of Burman, Jeejeebhoy and others.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

Show