Sri Lanka's Fashion Market looks to tie up with Jaypore

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Oct 27, 2017

The Sri Lankan ethnic and fusion wear brand Fashion Market has reported high sales in India and is looking to partner with the multi-brand marketplace Jaypore to increase their distribution reach.

The Founder and Managing Director of Fashion Market, Linda Speldewinde, said about the brand’s success in India: “Our Indian customer base just took off. And that’s what really encouraged me. Sri Lanka too caught up with the brand but of course the numbers won’t match India for sheer size of market.”

The brand was founded in 2015 has been selling through their own e-commerce site for the last two years without appearing on any of India’s main e-commerce marketplaces. According to Speldewinde, this is because these marketplaces do not reflect their customers. In order to make their products more widely available, however, the brand is now looking to tie up with Jaypore. Jaypore was founded in the US but focuses on their presence in India and is a multi-brand online marketplace that specialises in Indian ethnic fashion. Partnering with Jaypore will increase both the audience and distribution capacity of the brand and so could help them to grow still more in India.

The brand is not only looking to increase its already growing presence in India but is also seeking to use their growth to create sustainable employment opportunities in their home country. Speldewinde said: “Everything we have is designed and made in Sri Lanka. The batik material we use is mostly made and handwoven in the villages of Sri Lanka…. I could see that if we broke through India and delivered the kind of numbers we were going to deliver, instead of helping just a hundred weavers in Sri Lanka we could be elevating the livelihood of 5000. This is not just relevant to Sri Lanka; we could make this work for India, Bangladesh and other emerging economies.”