Franchising has helped a lot of brands in expanding themselves. With the many models it offers, it solely depends on each brand the choices they make. For a brand that is into fitness and supplements, it takes the right efforts in franchising to grow in the right direction. In a conversation with Dr Ankur Hastir, Founder and MD, Body Building India and Gym 99, at the Franchise India 2017, he tells us about the franchising details of his brand and the various advantages it brings with it for the brand to succeed.
Kindly give us a brief about your brand.
Our brand is BodyBuilding India. We started a website 3 years back as a content-based portal. So, we have half a million followers on social media platforms who basically come and read articles about bodybuilding, fitness, nutrition, food and everything related to health and we also sell supplements online. A year back, probably the same time, we started a franchising model with Franchise India and now we have 40 franchise stores PAN India. We have most of the stores in North India and definitely, we are expanding branches to South India as well.
What trends can you see emerging in the Indian Fitness industry?
As I always say that everybody wants to be fit. The ones who are slim want to gain weight and those who are fat want to lose it. Everybody wants to look better because there is peer pressure. If you see movies, see your friends around or you just go to the mall and see fit people there, the trend is only evolving and India is getting fitter and healthier. If we talk about food, people are definitely consuming healthy foods and supplements.
How important is franchising today for a brand to expand?
If we talk about the supplements line, it is totally unorganised. In India, probably 90% of the supplements stores sell fake supplements. They buy without bill and don’t give taxes. We, being a franchise model and an urbanised player, are among the top brands now in India as we have 40 stores. We do things in an organised way due to selling the franchises. Our franchise model has established us in a perfect way.
Kindly tell us about your franchise models on offer and share its specifications.
Our franchise models are very basic. It’s not very expensive as we offer people Rs. 4 lakhs as one-time franchise cost, Rs 25000 for our company-owned interiors and Rs 18000 for our company-owned software which will help to summarise all the online selling and other important things. One obviously has to buy the stock which is perishable and rotation money is involved. So, approximately, we are giving help with the stock, operations, stores etc and it all costs around Rs 15-16 Lakhs.
What are your expansion plans for the brand?
We are right now 40 stores and for next year we are aiming 100 stores. So, we will be closing this financial year with probably 50+ stores up and running and by 2019, we are eyeing around 100 BodyBuilding India stores and around 20 Gym 99, up and running.
How has been your experience at the Delhi Show 2017 so far?
We started from Delhi Show 2016 and at that time we were just a 2 store company but now we are 40 stores big. The experience has been so far, so good. It has been really good and thinking of it being a weekday show, the outcome has been great. There are lot of hot leads, more than fifty hot leads are going on right now and we hope to close it at a lot many.
