Pepperfry to ramp up frachise-led expansion, says CEO Ashish Shah

livemint.com:

Mint. The online-offline retailer, which has over 180 stores in the country, is also reviewing plans for a market listing after choppy markets have prompted the company to postpone IPO plans, Shah said. Edited excerpts.

Since last October-November overall discretionary spending has been impacted significantly. This wasn’t a good time for our category. I would attribute this to the fact that we saw a lot of layoffs across startups as well as no increments.

Usually, our customers are those working in the startup and tech sectors and are very familiar with e-commerce. Mostly, our businesses driven people who move from smaller locations to large cities for jobs. Since the overall job market was not good, the last eight to nine months were quite subdued.

Having said that, we have started seeing some good action starting 10 October; business has been good. The sentiment changed because I think people have been holding on to their purchases. This gives us some hope that things will perhaps look up from here.

Customers are coming into stores, they’re coming online to buy our products. During this time of low discretionary spending, we spent a lot of time optimizing costs. So we went into each and every line item on the P&L and took significant actions.

From the cost standpoint, I would say that our business is fairly sorted now. As a buildup to the festive season, we significantly enhanced our catalogue—over the last four months we have launched 20 new collections across our private labels. We have also on-boarded close to 150-170 new brands in the home and furniture space.