Abfrl announces partnership with Gen-Next focused designer Masaba Gupta

India’s leading fashion company, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited, today announced a strategic partnership with India’s leading designer Ms. Masaba Gupta to build a gen-next focused fashion and lifestyle business under the popular and contemporary brand “Masaba”. This partnership aims to create a young, aspirational, and digital-led portfolio play across the affordable luxury segment in fashion, beauty, and accessory categories. A binding agreement to this effect has been signed today that gives ABFRL a majority stake in the entity. 

Brand “Masaba” will be scaled predominantly through the digital direct-to-consumer (D2C) channel, leveraging its strong connection with younger and digitally influenced consumers. The brand will straddle across the entire lifestyle offerings ranging from apparel, accessories, and other lifestyle products. The brand is targeting to achieve annual revenues of around Rs. 500 Cr in the next 5 years.  

This partnership will also mark ABFRL’s entry into the beauty & personal care market in India, which offers tremendous opportunities to build distinctive, scalable home-grown brands. This is a rapidly growing segment driven by an increase in women shoppers, a rise in disposable incomes, and acceleration in digital influence. 

Commenting on the partnership, Mr. Ashish Dikshit, Managing Director, ABFRL said: “As a new generation of young and digitally native consumers explore their needs within fashion and lifestyle, they actively seek brands that are colorful, vivid and digital. Masaba is a young, effervescent brand with a  refreshing and innovative take on every lifestyle category.” He added, “This partnership is an important step in building a presence in the fast-growing beauty and personal care segment. This fits in with our overall strategy to partner with India’s topmost designers to build a portfolio of distinctive and aspirational home-grown brands across fashion and lifestyle categories.  

Ms. Masaba Gupta, Founder, House of Masaba said, " As a young, homegrown brand I am delighted to partner with ABRFL to further solidify the House of Masaba into a 360-degree, global lifestyle brand of the future. Inspired by the ever-evolving, India-Proud Gen Z consumer, the brand will introduce multiple product extensions bringing Cosmetics, Personal Care, Athleisure & Home Decor to  its portfolio. The House of Masaba already has established a strong foothold among the youth with a  robust digital-first strategy and the tie-up with ABRFL will strengthen this position, making the brand future-ready. With this partnership, I also look forward to creating immersive experiences for our  target audience, that is already engaged in virtual mediums today and is driving the industry's  evolution to the Metaverse.'' 

The proposed acquisition is subject to necessary statutory approvals and the signing of definitive agreements.