Chumbak eyes 100% growth this year, to double down on marketing

Fashion, lifestyle and home décor brand Chumbak will mark 10% of its expected turnover for its marketing budget this year, and this will be skewed highly towards digital platforms given the engagement and audience presence there.

Vasant Nangia, CEO, Chumbak, in an exclusive conversation with BestMediaInfo.com, says how the brand plans to further scale its omni-channel business while investing in both digital and in-store marketing.

“As we plan to double our turnover by the end of this year, our overall marketing spends are definitely increasing while significantly increasing our digital spends,” he said.

Elaborating the brand’s overall marketing strategy, he said apart from reaching out to its loyal customer base and building up digital presence (including social media), it plans to resume in-store marketing once footfall is back.

It has signed Sara Ali Khan as its first brand ambassador for its home and watch categories with the #WithChumbak campaign.

The campaign follows a story-telling strategy, with each of the three films unfolding a day in the life of Sara Ali Khan when she moves in #WithChumbak.

The first film from the series:

The campaign features brand films created by The Script Room. The stills and mood films were created by Verrocchios Workways and the media strategy is handled by Wavemaker India.

The focus of the campaign is to strengthen the role of the brand from both an emotional and rational point of view.

Asked why it is associating with a celebrity for the first time in its 10 years of existence, he said, “We have been reaching out to influencers for many years. Right now, we've reached a point where we have the distribution and product line and to reach out to a broader audience, why we thought of on-boarding Sara.”

E-com-enabled digital sales have been growing rapidly for the brand. Nangia expects e-com to continue to grow even as stores start to gain traction again. In terms of revenue from each, it is close to 50:50 between the two channels.

Established in 2010, the brand started its journey as an India-inspired souvenir and accessories brand. Over the last decade, the brand transformed into a leading multi-category retailer with a dominating online presence along with 70+ exclusive brand stores.

The brand believes that retail is a destination for people to come, touch and feel the product and so it is aiming to make its business omni-channel. “The way we are headed is not purely offline or purely online but to build a robust multi- channel business,” he said.

Summing up its 10-year journey, Nangia said Chumbak has become a brand without its founders ever realising how big it could become.

“The product has resonated with the audiences and people love our products; they keep coming back. It has actually done beyond what the founders had foreseen. We are figuring out what people want much better, so that we are able to cater to the needs much better. Our target audience is young women from 20 to 35 years of age. The whole range of products that we offer is quite unique for them, thus helping us to establish a strong position in the market.”

Since people had been spending a lot of time at home during the pandemic, the brand has been seeing a lot of its home category products moving quite well, he said.

“I think the lifestyle fashion categories, which took a little bit of a backseat, will come back in a bigger way once the pandemic is over,” he said.

The brand features a portfolio of home and lifestyle categories such as décor and living, bed and furnishing, kitchen and dining, watches and accessories, and has a few categories in the pipeline over the next few months.

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