Binny Bansal-Backed Purple Style Labs Acquires Fashion Label Wendell Rodricks

The mumbai-based fashion house of designers and stylists Purple Style Labs has acquired Wendell Rodricks to scale the resort wear label to leverage ecommerce and its flagship stores.

Prior to this, Purple Style Labs had acquired multi-brand luxury wear marketplace Pernia’s Pop Up Shop for an undisclosed amount back in August 2019. The duo had started their collaboration in 2019 to expand their business across all modes of retail channels, both in domestic and international markets.

Purple Style Labs claims to have grown Pernia’s Pop-Up shop by 10x within a span of 2 years since the acquisition. It converted the Pop-Up Shop to an omnichannel platform by launching concept stores across India. Currently, they are located in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Hyderabad, and the first international store was launched in Mayfair, London last year.

It now wants to create the same impact with the latest acquisition of Wendell Rodricks.

Speaking on the merger, Jerome Marrel, business and life partner of Wendell said, “I was looking for a strong investor to revive and carry on the Wendell Rodricks brand and PSL (Purple Style Labs) is the perfect choice to use Wendell’s DNA to carry on his legacy. I am very happy that the operations have already started. This business deal will help me move on with Wendell’s dream project, the Moda Goa Museum & Research Centre.”

Founded by Abhishek Agarwal in 2015, Purple Style Labs incubates young designer brands and helps them with sales, marketing, and technical support.

The company has raised about $5 Mn from investors like Flipkart’s Binny Bansal, PayU India’s Jitendra Gupta, and Astarc Ventures.

It also counts Falcon Edge Capital’s Navroz Udwadia, Premji Invest’s Rahul Garg, Lifestyle’s CEO Rishi Vasudev, Wazir Advisors’ Harminder Sahni, House of Anita Dongre’s Mukesh Sawlani and others to its investors’ list.

According to the India business of Fashion Report, India’s apparel market is expected to grow at nearly 11% to reach $85 Bn by 2021. The market was pegged at about $65 bn in 2019 and is currently the second largest retail market after food and grocery in India.

The segment grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.5% in the period from 2012-2017 and is expected to grow 11% between 2017 to 2021 as well.

The report further noted that the country’s fashion market is majorly driven by key growth drivers such as young demographics, rising urbanization, increasing affluence, and a growing middle-income segment, greater brand awareness, better accessibility and availability, and increased formalisation of the sector.