Easy Buy is all About 'Super Styles at Super Prices'

With a strong proposition of ‘super styles at super prices’, Easybuy offers more than 1,000 styles from Rs 69 to Rs 699 across all segments – men, women and kids. Within four years of its operational rollout, Easybuy has opened 80 stores in 40 cities. Here are the excerpts from an interaction with Anand Aiyer, Senior Vice President and Business Head, Easybuy.

Considering the competition in the value fashion segment, what strategies helped the brand scale?

Easybuy is the only format which offers fashion for the entire family in 5,000 sq. feet of space and given our approach of FMCG model in fashion, our prices are 25% cheaper than the market and hence our primary focus is on scaling. Our aim is to make fashion affordable for neo-India and hence we bring a curated collection at lower than market prices which makes us unique. We also have ‘many firsts’ which take us far-ahead of any competition – for example, the first ever fabric warehouse, an integrated MSME ecosystem, partnership-based franchising model, and so on. The unique franchising model has helped us scale up very fast – reaching 80 stores in just four years and our aim is to open a store in every district headquarters, which is about 700+in India currently.

Could you walk us through the USPs of your business model?

Some of the unique practices of our model include a company store manager in every store to lead the operations of the store in line with our best-in-class processes, inventory management and the fact that every franchisee employee goes through a comprehensive training module ranging from classroom, videos and role plays. Each store manager is also given a ‘Happy Card’ with engagement budgets loaded in the card to devise store-specific people plans. Easybuy is unique and a retail innovation in many ways. It’s the only mono brand family format at prices 25% lower than the nearest competition, exclusively designing and launching new and fresh fashion every two months.

What are the strengths of your franchise model?

To deliver deeper penetration and fast expansion,t Easybuy we believe on partnership and have created a unique ‘operational franchisee model’. In this model the company participates with the franchisee, starting from site selection to capex to retail operations. Easybuy further introduced unique and key business drivers to the whole franchising model through company-appointed store managers, standard operating procedures and policies to enable franchisees to manage the business, area managers to guide and support and manage the stock mix of each and every store through our unique ‘dynamic auto-replenishment system’, and also manage the liquidation of store-specific, floor-mix post season.

What is your long-term vision for the brand? Easybuy’s brand vision is to make aspirations affordable for neo-India. We would like to open a store in every district headquarters which has a potential of 700+ stores and we have already launched 80 stores in four years of operations, making us the fastest growing value-fashion retailer. Our unique franchising model has been a key driver for the growth of the brand and through the innovative model, not only our franchisees are happy, but most of the franchisees now own 3 – 4 Easybuy stores. In the last two years, we have also entered many new markets including Orissa and West Bengal. We will also open stores aggressively in North India as well, thereby making us a true national player. We target 200+ stores by 2022.