Reliance Brands, Rahul Mishra Form Joint Venture to Boost RTW
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NEW DELHI — In a move aimed at boosting his ready-to-wear and expanding physical retail, Indian designer Rahul Mishra has formed a joint venture with Reliance Brands, Ltd., the country’s largest retailer in the luxury to premium sector.
The joint venture will be 60 percent owned by Reliance and 40 percent by Mishra.
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Mishra, whose brand covers both couture and rtw, was the first Indian designer to win the Woolmark Prize in 2014. He is also a familiar figure on the global fashion circuit, having shown at Paris Fashion Week for 13 seasons, and became the first Indian designer to showcase at Paris Haute Couture week, beginning in January 2020.
The collaboration will create both vertical and horizontal growth for the brand. “It has been our desire to equally focus on the ready-to-wear business and extend our universe by democratizing the fashion cultivated by us,” Mishra told WWD.
Reliance Brands, which is a subsidiary of India’s largest private sector company Reliance Industries Ltd., has partnerships in India that include A|X Armani Exchange, Bally, Bottega Veneta, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Canali, Coach, Diesel and Dune, among others.
Darshan Mehta, managing director of Reliance Brands, said, “At RBL, we have been driven by a strong conviction that every brand whether it be Raghavendra Rathore, Ritu Kumar or a Giorgio Armani — each has its own beating heart, its own fashion vocabulary and its own cache of loyal customers, across geographies. At the same time, we constantly watch the evolution of consumers’ wardrobes. Over the last few years, we find that early adapters in India have now become fashionistas in their own right. As part of this evolution, fashion crafted by Indian designers is finding increasing space in the wardrobes of these consumers.”
Both parties are clear about the way forward, describing it as “game-changing.”
“This collaboration is exclusively to co-create a new ready-to-wear brand that is based on the blueprint of our pre-existing ready-to-wear segment that has been a part of Paris Fashion Week for 13 seasons, up [until] the season fall 2020,” Mishra said. “In the past, our ready-to-wear collections have retailed across the globe — they’ve been on the window of Colette in Paris as the bestselling collection, Harvey Nichols London, Moda Operandi and Farfetch, amongst others. Our rtw occupied space globally — ‘far and wide,’ hence it is an area of huge interest for the brand.”
The new brand will go strong on physical retail as well. “Creating a brand universe will need multiple physical stores and a presence all across the globe to start in at least, all the major fashion capitals of the world as well as in India,” Mishra added.
RBL operates 1,596 doors, split into 680 freestanding stores and 916 shops-in-shop in India. The group also has equity investments in Indian couture brands Manish Malhotra and Raghavendra Rathore.
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