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Rise of the Vertically Integrated Brands

By Krishna Vinjamuri, Principal, Lightbox Ventures
Thursday, May 7, 2015
By Krishna Vinjamuri, Principal, Lightbox Ventures
Lightbox Ventures is a $100 million venture capital firm based out of Mumbai focusing on early stage consumer technology businesses.

It is really good to be a consumer today in India. The past decade has seen many improvements in technology and the universal adoption of the smartphone has enabled both large and also small businesses to reach consumers, and lots of them, for the first time. For consumers this means access to what before was limited to local distribution. Before the massification of the Internet only big players with nation-wide distribution networks would scale, now reach barriers have been lowered and as a consequence new and emerging brands were born.

Fragmented High Margin Businesses
Sectors such as apparel, eyewear, jewellery, furniture are so heavily brand fragmented that the market share of national brands is in single digits. The margins in these sectors are pretty high as well making them attractive businesses to build brands. In the American and Chinese markets new brands are created in a short span of time, supported by significant VC capital:

Category Player with Scale/Funding

U.S.

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