Commodities

Fabmart Goes International With Jewellery Store

/ BUSINESS STANDARD Nov 23, 2001, 00:00

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Bangalore-based e-tailing site Fabmart recently went international with its jewellery store. The site is reaching its variable break even point in December this year. The e-tailing site is also considering the option of starting apparel, gifts or consumer durable store in the near future.

This assumes significance since Fabmart is one of the few e-tailing sites which continues to do well post dot come bubble burst.

“We felt that there was an huge opportunity in selling Indian jewellery designs to NRIs. We went for an email campaign to generate awareness about the store. We might go for print campaign as well but we want to see the response to the store first,” K Vaitheeswaran, vice president-marketing told Business Standard. Significantly, jewellery store is the first store which has started making profit for the site.

The e-tailing site has eight stores-grocery, books, music, toys, jewellery, computer, watch and movie store. The site was funded by Reliance in the first round of Rs 5.5 crore and received its second round of funding of Rs 20 crore by Chrysalis and Reliance in May last year. Overall break even for the site is likely to be by April 2003.

“As far as the number of orders are concerned, we get the maximum number of orders from our music and book store but grocery store generates the maximum revenue for us. The main reason for this is that everybody buys grocery,” Vaitheeswaran said.

Interestingly, gorcery store is operational only in four cities—Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune. Fabmart is also contemplating to bring the grocery store in Mumbai and Delhi. “Grocery has been the fulcrum of our customer acquisition program,” Vaitheeswaran said.

Commenting on whether they would take other stores international, Vaitheeswaran said, “Music and books are definitely an option but the problem is that legally its not possible since most of the books have different price in India and abroad.”

In contrast to the trend, Fabmart didn’t go in for extensive media campaign. “In the first year of operation it was very important for us to build awareness, so we had a media campaign but we decided not to go for TV campaign at all. Now we are in the second phase of our campaign when we are trying to cash on the awareness generated in the first phase. In the third phase we would want to turn existing customers into loyal customers,” Vaitheeswaran said. The advertisements coming out now focus primarily on the offers that Fabmart is offering and not on awareness about the site or online shopping.