What Wrogn did right?

Right for the Wrogn reasons Anjana Reddy has built a redoubtable ready-to-wear garments business in four years with top brands such as Wrogn and Imara. Today we will see how things changed over years and shaped a brand which was an idea to a success.

BEGINNING

Anjana Reddy came back to India in 2011 after a postgraduate degree in the U.S., she wanted to follow up on a business idea that struck her when she was in college. She wanted to set up a branded memorabilia business.

In the U.S., sports collectibles such as sports team jerseys and baseball cards are a multi billion-dollar industry. Reddy took a fancy to the idea. She figured that India with its huge cricket-crazy population and sporting stars like Sachin Tendulkar would be an easy market. A friend set up a meeting with a local partner of California-based venture capital firm Accel.

Anjana was just 24 then and thought of pitching her idea of selling sporting memorabilia to cricket-loving Indians. Mahendran Balachandran, who she met at Accel, listened patiently to her presentation. He told her that her idea was impressive and he would invest in her company on one condition: She needed to rope in a celebrity to give her business immediate visibility.

SETBACK

Reddy was clear that if she wanted a celebrity to associate with her company, she wasn’t going to settle for anyone but the best. She zeroed in on Tendulkar, who was then India’s most popular sporting icon. She chased Tendulkar for the next 15 months for an appointment until she managed an introduction through a mutual friend. Reddy convinced the star cricketer to not only endorse the company but also pick up an undisclosed stake.

She set up Universal Sportsbiz Pvt Ltd (USPL) in April 2012. Accel invested ₹17.5 crore in July. But roping in a celebrity isn’t enough sometimes. Anjana’s first business venture was Collectabillia, an e-commerce site that sold autographed merchandise of sports icons like Sachin Tendulkar and football star Cristiano Ronaldo, took a hit and wasn’t successful.

After her first plan didn’t fly, she had to quickly change tack and evolve a new business model. “It soon became evident that the memorabilia business was not going to be easy to scale despite celebrities backing it. There was hardly anyone willing to pay for memorabilia,” says Reddy.

TURNAROUND

But from the failure of the memorabilia business came another idea. Unanticipated brisk sales of Sachin T-shirts around the time of his retirement in November 2013 got Reddy thinking about zeroing in on garments as her next business. “We sold over 10,000 T-shirts online in a very short period and it set us wondering if apparel would make a good product. It was also a scaleable business,” she says.

As it turned out, it did make a good product—and it was scaleable. After being in business for just five years, Bengaluru-based USPL is a leading celebrity-endorsed branded apparel company. Funded by private equity investors like Accel and Alteria Capital, USPL is valued at ₹1,200 crore after its last round of funding in October when it received $13.5 million.

The company sells a huge range of casual-wear brands like Wrogn, Imara, Ms. Taken, and Single backed by film stars like Kriti Sanon and Aditya Roy Kapur. If you haven’t heard of these brands, it’s probably because you aren’t a millennial shopping for skinny jeans and sequinned tees. Prices are affordable and growth in sales has been nothing short of spectacular: Revenues were at ₹24 crore in FY15 and are estimated to leap to ₹425 crore in FY19, propelling 31-year-old Reddy into Fortune India’s 2019 Most Powerful Women in business list at a debut rank of No. 35.

Reddy’s success is even more remarkable because she has fashioned a successful business even though India’s apparel industry hasn’t exactly been on a tear. India is the world’s second-most populous nation and has all the trappings to become one of the world’s biggest ready-to-wear markets— such as the highest number of young people and a growing middle class—but it still lags behind less populous countries like Germany and Britain. No Indian brand made it to the top 20 list of global apparel brands in a recent report by consulting firm McKinsey. A host of factors such as lack of organised retail trade and fragmented manufacturing has stifled the apparel industry’s growth.

STRATEGY

Despite the industry drawbacks, Reddy has stitched a successful business strategy. Initially, her brands were available exclusively on just two platforms—retail chain Shoppers Stop and Myntra, an e-commerce store. Last year, she expanded to brick-and-mortar retail chains like Pantaloons Retail and the Future Group’s Central stores. She is now is in talking terms with another fashion retail chain, Lifestyle, that will ensure the presence of the brands in 800 shops.

Reddy’s products stand out in a crowded market because of her strategy of signing up celebrities to endorse her brands. For the menswear brand, i.e Wrogn, she tied hands with Virat Kohli in 2014, when he was having a bad run and still not the icon he is today. For Imara, the women’s brand, Shraddha Kapoor was signed and last year replaced her with actress Jacqueline Fernandez. “The idea of roping in a celebrity was to solve the problem of discovery of our brands and forms only a small part of our overall strategy,” says Reddy.