10club aims to carve out niches for each brand, from structuring their product mixes to their pricing models, so that each of them has its unique role and offers.
10club, a leading e-commerce roll-up player today announced the acquisition of three Lawn and Garden brands – Kraftseeds, Gate Garden, and Kriti Kalash. The brands specialize in seeds, soil, flower bulbs, manure, planters, tools, and every other kind of equipment a consumer might need for their home gardening needs.
The category saw an unprecedented spike during the pandemic, as people stayed home and looked for ways to make their homes feel fresh while cultivating hobbies that relieve stress and improved their homes.10club believes that this trend is here to stay and aims at focusing its energies on capitalizing on the growth in this category. As per their estimates, the current category size is about $900mn with less than 10% online penetration, growing at 70%+ YOY in 2020-2021.
Commenting on the Portfolio Strategy of 10Club, Co-founder and COO Deepak Nair said: “We are extremely bullish on the Home category and the acquisition of three strong brands in the Lawn & Garden segment gives us a strong foothold and more importantly will complement the six new acquisitions that we will announce shortly. With these acquisitions, we will be clocking revenue of over $50mn in the home category alone.”
The founders of the brands Kraftseeds, Gate Garden, and Kriti Kalash saw promise and potential in their business almost two decades earlier. Regardless of the challenges of a category that wasn’t as lucrative back then, they spent a considerable amount of time understanding the preferences of the urban consumer and took this nascent business online via Amazon.
They developed an exceptional expertise in sourcing seeds and a strong network with farmers who could contract farms for them, customized to meet their requirements of seed varieties, seasonality, volume, and specific quality standards, enabling them to source the best quality seeds at the most reasonable prices. Over the years, they expanded their product lines to include other products such as planters, soil & coco peat, gardening tools, and flower bulbs. When COVID hit and the category saw a boom, they were not only equipped to cater to the demand from a product mix perspective but the network they had spent years to build also paid off.
Expressing their thoughts on the acquisition, Gaurav and Shaina, Founders, Kraftseeds said, “Over the past 20 years, we’ve worked hard on building a strong business that has emerged as a category leader on Amazon. Our vision for Kraftseeds, however, is so much larger. We want to reach more households across India, encouraging consumers to grow plants and fall in love with gardening. We believe that to achieve this, 10club is the right partner for us as they are equipped with an extremely capable team and are aligned with our vision.”
Today Kraftseeds is the #1 brand for gardening tools and seeds on Amazon with an offering of 3,600 SKUs on the platform.
Through the acquisition, 10club aims to carve out niches for each brand, from structuring their product mixes to their pricing models, so that each of them has its unique role and offering. Channel expansion constitutes an important aspect to boost growth by capitalizing on platforms such as Jiomart, Meesho, and Flipkart. Building a strong brand identity and social communities around the brands will be key for growth especially since this category requires a substantial amount of knowledge sharing with customers. 10club comes in with dedicated resources and a centralized platform that designs these systems for rapid and sustainable growth.
Commenting on the acquisition, Mona Adurty Bagheria, Partner Growth at 10club, says “We are very excited to partner with the founders on growing these brands to be India’s first home-grown gardening brand with a national imprint. We already see how much customers love these brands, as is evident from Amazon ratings. We intend to work with the founders on increasing their online presence, bringing in operational and marketing expertise to scale them up sustainably.”
10Club aims to build a deeply valuable portfolio and elevate the entrepreneurial ecosystem within the country by offering e-commerce sellers a financial exit and the right kind of resources required to help them scale the businesses they have taken years to build. Earlier this year, they raised a seed round of $40 million which saw participation from HeyDay, PDS International, Class 5 Global, Secocha Ventures, and founders of hardware startup boAt being the other investors.
Source: Business World
