We have pressed the accelerator on Rangita stores and are looking at 25 by the end of this year…
After AceVector Limited recently announced leadership changes, Himanshu Chakrawarti has completely shifted focus from Snapdeal to Stellaro Brands, working on scaling operations and driving growth and efficiency in the highly competitive Indian online space.
A turnaround expert with over 30 years of experience in building and scaling brands, Himanshu Chakrawarti, CEO, Stellaro Brands, is playing a pivotal role in driving Stellaro Brands’ growth and expanding its operations in a highly competitive market. In an exclusive interaction on the sidelines of India Fashion Forum 2025 with IMAGES Group Editorial Head, Surabhi Khosla, he talks about Stellaro’s star brand Rangita and its operating model of targeting value-conscious online shoppers through quality products and contemporary styles at great prices.
Why did Snapdeal diversify and launch Stellaro Brands?
AceVector has three entities. One is Unique Commerce, which is the largest provide of services to D2C brands as well as other brands in general. Then we have Snapdeal, a platform which has been around for a while and which I used to run. And finally a new business that we incubated, which is a house of brands called Stellaro Brands.
Stellaro Brands was born of the need to provide good quality, good designs and good fashion to the mass market in India at great prices, something which is not available at present. We felt that this was a great opportunity, a great space to create brands in.
Take for example our brand Rangita. The brand sells kurtis starting at Rs 399 for regular wear. Prices for a full three-piece suit set can go up to Rs 1,999 – these are for special occasions. Apart from affordability, we also provide consumers with a great shopping ambience. Our stores look very upmarket. So, in a nutshell, if you were to look at a western equivalent, we are the Primark of ethnicwear in India – great experience, good quality & fresh merchandise, fantastic prices and good-looking shops, which have excellent displays. Also, all our stores are profitable.
Last year, around the same time, you had launched Rangita in some test markets. Which of these geographies have you launched in and which ones are you now targeting this year?
We launched our first store exactly one year ago in Gajuwaka (December 2023), which is a township in Vizag. A month later in January 2024, we launched our second store in Kakinada, again in coastal Andhra. Post that, we decided to sit back and study the two stores, see whether they were working for us, whether the market was working and if they were profitable, and so there was a gap of approximately 8-9 months before we launched more stores.
About four months ago, we launched two more stores, one in Kurnool (again in Andhra Pradesh) and one in Attapur in Hyderabad. All of these are Tier 2 locations and all four stores are doing extremely well. I can now safely say that the testing phase is over and we have pressed the accelerator on launching stores. We are looking to launch 25 stores in this calendar year.
And are you planning to move up north or stay down south?
All stores that we are planning to launch will be in Andhra and Telangana. In fact, we might move further south and launch a few in Tamil Nadu. Aside from this, we have our own online retail channel, www.rangita.com and we are present on all popular marketplaces including Myntra, Ajio, Amazon. We are Omnichannel in the sense that pricing is uniform across platforms and we ensure that the consumer has a flawless brand experience, whichever platform they choose to shop at.
Going online means challenges like return rates. What measures do you have in place to handle these?
Currently, returns happen for all channels separately. D2C (own website) returns go back to our warehouse; marketplace returns are dependent on our arrangement with them – either to our warehouse or to their warehouse. However, what is important to note here is that in our retail stores, the returns are virtually next to nothing. There’s a small amount that happens on size exchange but retail the return rate is not even 0.01% and this is when we have a very liberal return policy. On our own website too, returns are very low, mostly for a size issue and then too, people prefer exchange over return. This shows that our products are superlative.
What are your strategic priorities over the next three years for Rangita in particular and Stellaro Brands in general?
One of our key insights, as we studied the market before launching Rangita, was that most people don’t even recall the name of value brands whose products they bought from marketplaces. There is no recall value, nothing sticks in the consumer’s mind, except maybe a few brands which are already well known.
Our idea, our strategy, therefore, was that we wanted to create a proper brand – a label which was thought of as a brand, conceived as a brand, with the design language of a brand, promoted as a brand, and presented as a brand to consumers. With Rangita there is clear opportunity to create loyalty within the value-conscious customer base.
We want to do in the value segment exactly what brands like U.S. Polo Assn. and Manyavar have done in the premium end of the market. We can expand to hundreds of stores simply because the product is good. There are other brands which have done this in the value segment but they are all in the Westernwear domain – for example, Zudio.
Which other brands are you focusing on apart from Rangita?
We are working on a similar strategy for a value chain in the athleisure space with another new brand called Fit Monkey.
