Bangalore: Flipkart to launch dedicated online brand stores targeting a new demographic of online shoppers, mainly the young buyers in the age group of 20-27 years. Though the online retailer has said that it will take two or three months to launch the multibrand stores, the Puma brand store is seen much earlier on the website.  

Flipkart displays the Puma merchandise in its dedicated store and has been designed in a way that it projects the brand’s image as a premium one. The best deals and discounts can be seen under the ‘featured picks’ unlike the main website where it will all be highlighted on the home page. However, Brands may prefer the idea because of Flipkart’s reach in the market, which can be difficult to achieve with their own virtual stores online. Flipkart’s idea of a brand store would provide the details of the number of visits, searches and transactions of a particular brand. "The concept is very similar to shop-in-shop formats that you see in an offline retail store. And one could move to a monetization model where the brand is paying for the visibility, like is the case offline," added Shoumyan Biswas, senior director of marketing at Flipkart.

Moreover, "Brand stores will be co-created along with the brands. We choose the brand only if we believe that there are very strong brand loyalists wanting to buy that brand," said Biswas.

Similarly, Flipkart launched the fashion lifestyle category a year ago receiving satisfying response from people. Now with this new addition of multi brand stores and targeting younger crowd, it will be able to reach out to the buyers from places where the suppliers and distributors of some lifestyle brands have not been able to set up their stores yet.