Arvind Mafatlal group forays into edutech, student solutions

CHENNAI: The 116-year-old Arvind Mafatlal Group has announced its foray into the fast growing education technology and services space.

The group has launched ‘Uniform Junction’, an integrated supply chain solution and platform for K12 schools.

Mafatlal group will leverage its five plus decades’ of experience working with schools to supply uniforms (where it owns 85 per cent market share in organised market) and extend its capabilities in school supply chain, to provide the widest and most comprehensive range of school products as well as academic and non-academic courses and empower schools to be future-ready.

Uniform Junction has already partnered with 500 schools across India and looks to triple this number by the end of 2021 and enable over 50,000 schools with the best and most futuristic K12 student solutions in the next three years, a company release said. Mafatlal Group has made an initial investment of $three million in the new venture to build a robust technology platform and a partner network of the best school product and service providers from across the globe.

Announcing the group’s foray, Priyavrata Mafatlal, MD and CEO of Mafatlal Industries and Co-founder and Director of Uniform Junction said, “Like many other companies, the pandemic and the lockdown last year provided ample time for us to look closer at our strengths and capabilities and how better we could leverage it, while addressing the most relevant needs of a fast changing world and society.” “At the same time we witnessed up close how a vast majority of schools, especially those in the non-metro and tier I and II cities, that were otherwise among the most effective and efficient, grappled with the new norm, online learning and a need to go beyond regular academic curriculum”, he said.

“This experience and the sudden stagnation of the uniform business is what set us thinking and led to the birth of Uniform Junction,” he added.