Ananya Birla ventures into online luxury products business

Ananya Birla, the daughter of Kumar Mangalam and Neerja Birla, on Thursday launched her second venture CuroCarte, an e-commerce platform for premium handmade luxury products, which will go live on September 11.

The e-commerce platform will offer products curated currently from nine countries--Spain, Portugal, Thailand, Morocco, France, Vietnam, the UK, Indonesia and India. It will have 1,500 products across 70 categories in the decorative and other similar segments. CuroCarte was set up with an initial investment of Rs 6 crore.

Birla's first venture is Svatantra Microfin Pvt. Ltd, a Mumbai-based microfinance institution which offers loans to women in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. It was launched in 2013.

CuroCarte, run by Svatantra Online Services Pvt. Ltd., will run on an inventory-based model and seek to create a space for itself in the premium sector. It says it has tied up with an international laboratory which tests every product before production starts.

"Through the brand, we aim to revolutionize the e-commerce space by bringing inaccessible aesthetically appealing products from all around the world to the people in India and also to a global audience," said Birla, the scion of the billionaire Birla family. "The charm of CuroCarte lies in the fact that we curate these products directly from the makers themselves from all around the world. We are trying to organize the unorganized market through technology."

The products will be priced from Rs 7,000 to Rs 10,000 and will target the 25-28 years age group.

"Given the turnaround time of these products, as each product takes about 45 to 90 days to be made by the maker, we cannot get into the typical e-commerce one- to two-day delivery thing because we have to make an inventory as well. But for products that are in stock, our delivery time would be around three to seven days," said Kanupriya Verma, COO of CuroCarte.

The firm will not offer any discounts and will focus mostly on digital and outdoor marketing as part of its campaign strategy.

Currently available on the web, the CuroCarte team intends to launch an app in the next four to five months.

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