Fashion brand FabAlley raises Rs 60 crore funding

Delhi NCR-based High Street Essentials Pvt Ltd (HSE), which owns women-centric fashion brands, FabAlley and Indya, has secured Rs 60 crores in a Series B round of funding from SAIF Partners. This is the third round of equity funding by HSE. The latest round also includes a partial secondary share sale by Indian Angel Network, HSE's earliest investor.

The company plans to deploy the fresh round of funding towards increasing distribution, product expansion, brand-building efforts and strengthening the technology backbone.

HSE was started in 2012 by two women entrepreneurs – Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik, with fast fashion brand, FabAlley. The women-only Western Wear brand is among the largest online-led brands in the country and is retailed through FabAlley's own website, leading online marketplaces and large format retailers such as Central and Globus.

Shivani Poddar said, "The capital infusion will help us scale our offline presence rapidly from 15 exclusive outlets and 120 shop-in-shops to 50 and 300 respectively by the end of FY20. We will invest in new categories such as Athleisure and our plus size brand, Curve."

Tanvi Malik added, "Our goal is to capture both online and offline growth opportunities by leveraging our channel-agnostic approach through phygital store experiences, virtual fitting rooms, seamlessly merged forward and reverse logistics – all aimed at benefitting from the strategic advantages of both channels, while minimising their inherent disadvantages."

Mukul Arora, Managing Director of SAIF Partners will join the company’s board. He said, "When we met Shivani and Tanvi, we were really impressed by their deep customer understanding and solid execution muscle. They have built two successful brands in an extremely capital efficient manner, and are well placed to build a very valuable business. We are very excited to partner with them on this journey."