Alia Bhatt Launches Kidswear Brand Ed-a-Mamma
Bollywood actress Alia Bhatt has launched her startup venture Ed-a-mamma in the kids wear category. The brand offers a wide range of naturally sourced and sustainable apparel for kids of 2-14 years. The actress with investments in platforms like Nykaa and Stylecracker, has fully funded Ed-a-mamma which is being run by a small in-house design, marketing and operation team.
The actress feels strongly about the environment and wanted to give some strong message to conserve it through this brand. So, for now the brand has used organic cotton and non-plastic buttons for the range. “We strongly believe in the ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ proposition and use leftover fabrics to make hair ties and potlis. Most of our tees come with environment centric messages printed on it. Every order placed comes with a ‘seed ball’ which contains seeds of live plants which motivates young children and their parents to plant trees,” she added.
“Unlike the saturated fashion market for women, we have realized there’s a big gap when it comes to a world-class clothing brand for children which is made in India,” said Bhatt in an interview with Livemint.
“We have ensured that ethical clothing shouldn’t be a farfetched thought. Customers can buy good quality clothes at an affordable price. The customer response to the brand has been a testimony to that. Nearly 70% of our range has already been sold out since the launch six weeks ago. It’s reassuring that the products can sell on its own and as the demand increases we will look into other verticals such as accessories, footwear and toys,” Bhatt added.
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The brand expects to tie up with multi-brand e-tailer platforms like Amazon and Flipkart by next year. Currently it is available in the online baby care store FirstCry.com with a range starting from rupees 350. The brand seeks to launch its dedicated e-commerce website by April 2021.
“There are two key challenges that the brand will face primarily reaching the correct target audience who have the purchasing power and secondly investing in educating those set of consumers who do not buy into sustainability proposition in their clothing choices. Globally, sustainable clothing is targeted at women. So from that perspective sustainable kids wear is a good category to venture into, as most purchase decisions are made by mothers. Having said that, since there is no big national brand for kids wear in India, design, quality and convenience are huge USPs to follow rather than sustainability alone”, said Sreedhar Prasad, internet business expert and former partner at KPMG.
According to him, the one category where customers are bound to buy new products almost every year is for kids. This leads to a huge wastage. Hence, Ed-a-mamma can be instrumental in keeping this balance with its environment friendly approaches.
Ed-a-mamma is Alia’s fully owned venture unlike many other celebrity clothing labels that are co-created with a revenue sharing model.
