Future Group will be launching an online version of its discounted retail chain ‘Brand Factory’ in February, its CEO Kishore Biyani said on Thursday, while terming it the company’s biggest launch in the online space.
“We have invested in our online business… we are trying to understand the space again. In February, we are launching brandfactory.in. I think that this will be our biggest launch in the e-commerce business,” he said speaking at the TiE Global Summit.
Mr. Biyani pointed out that the company started futurebaazar.com at a time when Flipkart came in the market, admitting that “may be we started a bit early but folded up early also. We lost money in that business.”
“Then we got into assisted e-commerce that didn’t work, we bought Fab Furnish which didn’t work,” he said.
He, however, added that the company plus size clothing brand, ALL, had done well online and now about 10% of its large size clothing business comes from its own site.
He further added that taking learning from the Fab Furnish business, the company sells its Hometown products on other sites as well. “This year, we will do 100 crore business selling on other people’s site [hometown]… so we learnt something out of it. To run a business on our own, it was turning out to be expensive and [we were] losing money.”