Sriveda eyes franchisee route for retail biz
NEW DELHI: Packaged consumer goods maker Sriveda Sattva Pvt. Ltd, founded by spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, has firmed up plans to leverage the franchisee route for expansion of its physical retail stores.
Sriveda, formerly known as Sri Sri Ayurveda, is seeking to accelerate growth offline at a time when its rival Patanjali Ayurveda Ltd, founded by yoga guru Baba Ramdev, is banking on the e-commerce channel.
Sriveda has an e-commerce portal, srisritattva.com, and some of its products are available on online marketplaces Amazon and Big Basket.
“We have decided to open the franchisees in three formats for packaged goods and ayurvedic wellness formulations. We’ll have 1,000 franchise outlets nationwide in two years. We hope the franchise stores will generate about ₹500 crore by 2020,” Sriveda chief executive officer of Tej Katpitia, said.
Sri Sri Tattva Mart, the first format spread over 300-400 sq ft, will showcase and sell its packaged food, personal care and home care products. The second format, namely Sri Sri Tattva Wellness Place, spread over 200250 sq ft, will be focused on health and wellness. Each of these centres will have an ayurveda doctor to provide a detailed diagnosis and prescribe lifestyle and ayurveda medicines to patients.
Sri Sri Tattva Home and Health, the largest of the three formats, spread over around 600 sq ft and above, will have the entire range of daily use products as well as medicine and will also house ayurveda doctors, according to the company.
Earlier this month, Patanjali Ayurved, which had more than 10,000 stores selling only its products at the end of 2016, announced arrangements with eight e-commerce companies— Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm, Snapdeal, Grofers, Shopclues, Bigbasket, and 1Mg—to capture a sizeable slice of India’s estimated $1-billion online market for packaged consumer goods. Patanjali is planning to give a push to its e-commerce portal.
The online market for packaged consumer goods is projected to jump six times to $6 billion over the next three years, according to a September 2017 report by Google and the Boston Consulting Group.
Sri Sri Tattva, the brand of Sriveda, has a limited online presence through the company’s own website.