From New York to Namma Bengaluru: Cove & Lane is building a fashion brand for style-first Indian consumers
Cove & Lane is inspired by their philosophy of creating high quality outdoor styles that are perfect for day meetings to cocktail nights.
In a highly saturated apparel market, premium apparel brand Cove and Lane aims to put together styles that can be worn from the boardroom to the bar.
Launched by Sanya Pradhan and Adit Purohit earlier this month, Cove & Lane is inspired by its founders' philosophy of creating high quality outdoor styles that are perfect for day meetings to cocktail nights.
Today, the brand has raised Rs 6 crore in a seed funding round co-led by Sauce.vc and its founders.
The business began to take form when Pradhan and Purohit discovered a dearth of premium quality apparel with a fresh style and elevated look. They then decided to quit their jobs in New York in April last year and moved back home, to build a brand with synergies from Pradhan’s family business in apparel manufacturing and export.
“We realised there was a lot of congestion in the fast \but premium quality apparel was lacking. If we look at young, ambitious millennials, we want garments that can be worn from a corporate meeting to a cocktail night. We started building on this concept of industrial chic, which is what our brand stands for, it blends concepts from industrial core spaces and makes them in an aesthetic, elevated, more globally appealing design language,” Sanya Pradhan, Co-Founder of Cove & Lane tells YourStory.
Before this, Purohit spent over three years at TD Securities as a data scientist and Pradhan spent over four years at World Wide Technology as a consultant. The two had also initially dipped their toes into entrepreneurship with a home-run dips and sauces small business in the US.
Fierce competition
While fashion is not a winner-takes-all market, Cove & Lane competes in a segment that features popular homegrown players like Rare Rabbit and Virgio, who are creating premium styles for Indian consumers, as well global players like Zara and M&S riding on their style-first legacy.
Cove & Lane differentiates itself on moats of premium fabric, an India-focused range, and industrial chic styles. It uses proprietary fabric mixes made with bamboo and linen, particularly made for tropical weather, with qualities like colour fastness (resists fading), sweat proof and wrinkle resistance. It manufactures its apparel at factories in Bengaluru and Gurugram.
“There is a clear shift happening in the consumption behavior, especially fashion, from the traditional brands to new age brands. While multiple new age brands have built large businesses in fast fashion, we believe there is a large unfulfilled gap in the premium space. Across segments, we are seeing premiumisation as a secular and long term trend, whether it's travel, personal care, fashion or food & beverage,” explains Yash Dholakia, Partner at Sauce.vc.
Pradhan’s family business, which manufactures and exports apparel, also provides the company with a significant advantage, enabling them to use years of archived data, work on favourable credit terms, collaborate with expert vendors and work on smaller order quantities.
The company is able to tap into years of existing data to understand fits and styles, as well as experiment freely with different fabrics and smaller batches of various styles.
“This should translate to a great margin structure for the business, which should ultimately enable them to offer the best quality and design at very attractive prices,” believes Dholakia.
The Indian fast fashion landscape is divided into three segments: ultra value, mid value and premium based on the price, according to a Redseer Report released last year. The ultra value segment sees players like Zudio and Urbanic. The mid-value space has seen significant disruption with new-age D2C brands like Bliss Club, Snitch, and Freakins carving out a space.
“Our ideal customers are in their mid-to-late 20s and beyond. They see fashion as an extension of their personality and lifestyle. More than fast fashion trends we are focused on well curated drops focused on timeless fashion that is chic and elevated," adds Pradhan.
The premium segment mostly features brands like Zara, Uniqlo, Kazo among others, leaving a white space for companies to create style first, premium quality fabric-based apparel designs, made for Indian body types and for the tropical weather of the country.
It currently plans to launch its spring-summer collection and set up its D2C channel, followed by a foray on ecommerce platforms and offline expansion down the line.
Edited by Jyoti Narayan