26 October 2024, Mumbai
Leading Indian fashion brand, Brand Studio Lifestyle is ramping up sourcing from Bangladesh through a recently established sourcing office. The brand also aims to scale its retail footprint from 15 to 100 stores FY25-end, driven by a decade-long journey of steady, bootstrapped growth. Initially gaining traction on major online marketplaces, the brand has diversified into a direct-to-consumer (D2C) model and is now focusing on opening exclusive stores to strengthen its offline presence.
Brand Studio’s portfolio includes brands like Locomotive, a premium men’s casual line, and Highlander, offering T-shirts, shirts, and trousers priced affordably between Rs 399 and Rs 1,399. Tokyo Talkies provides a range of casualwear, while Vishudh focuses on womenswear with both daily and occasion fashion starting at Rs 499, with ethnicwear priced from Rs 1,999 to Rs 9,999. With Gen Z and young consumers at the core of its brand strategy, Brand Studio aims to make trending fashion accessible to a broad audience, particularly in Tier-II and Tier-III cities where fashion brand availability is limited. The success of Highlander stores in Gujarat towns like Rajkot and Nadiad underscores the rising demand for fast fashion in these regions. According to Shyam S Prasad, CEO, over 40 percent of the company’s D2C sales now come from Tier-III towns.
The brand’s automated warehouse management system enables it to track products within five minutes, facilitating its agile ‘test, try, and scale’ model. It launches each new collection with low inventory depth, ranging from 500 to 5,000 units per style, with quantities adjusted based on real-time performance.
The brand collaborates with over 400 supply chain partners, 80 percent of whom are based in India. Through its unique entrepreneur-led manufacturing model, Brand Studio Lifestyle supports technocrats in establishing small manufacturing units dedicated to the brand. Accounting for 20 percent of the brand’s sourcing, Bangladesh primarily supplies winterwear like jackets and sweatshirts, with competitive pricing, quality, and delivery reliability. The country’s world-class manufacturing standards and global material sourcing capabilities are pivotal to Brand Studio’s Lifestyle’s production strategy, further strengthening its position as a leader in fast fashion across India, notes Prasad.