The acquisition includes two sports and fitness brands Vifitkit and Yogarise, Frenchware, a kitchen label and Cingaro, a gardening brand – all with an annual run rate between $500k- $2 million. As part of the deal, the founders of Frenchware and Cinagro will also join Evenflow as consultants.
“We are looking to triple the growth for each of these brands in the next six months. We took our time to build our playbooks and formulate our expansion plans. At present, all four brands are Amazon only but we are in the process of onboarding them on other marketplaces including Flipkart, Meesho and Jiomart” said Utsav Agarwal, co-founder & CEO at Evenflow.
Evenflow has acquired all these brands at an upfront amount basis EBITDA multiple valuations and performance earn-outs spread over three years. Founded by former Uber executives Utsav Agarwal and Pulkit Chhabra in 2021, the e-commerce rollup over the past three months acquired seven brands including the latest acquisitions.
The company had
earlier acquired Xtrim, a sports and fitness accessories brand, baby-care brand BabyPro and
Rusabl, an online brand in the daily sustainables category.
Last week, Thrasio, the US company which pioneered the model of acquiring private brands on Amazon.com and scaling them up, said it
plans to invest $500 million in India as it sees the country becoming a significant market in the long term. Thrasio made its first acquisition in India by purchasing a majority stake in consumer durables brand Lifelong.
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Unlike other Thrasio-style rollups focusing on D2C brands, Evenflow is heavily focused on third-party sellers on marketplaces and acquires them at EBITDA multiples, not revenue multiples. Evenflow has been acquiring third-party e-commerce sellers with attractive product portfolios and aims to establish them as solid brands across multiple categories in e-commerce.
Vifitkit, a three year old brand, has 8,000+ ratings on Amazon’s Yoga Mat vertical while Hyderabad-based Cinagro, which started in 2017, is one of the bestsellers on Amazon and highest rated brands in the gardening category. Evenflow will help build Yogarise into a cult Yoga brand and expand Frenchware into a mass premium brand catering all major segments within the kitchen portfolio.
“We are extremely mindful of the number of brands we acquire, the idea is to solve for all operational bottlenecks and give each brand enough focus on its branding, launching new selection, formulating platform level strategies independently for it to thrive, unlock hyper-growth and unleash its true potential.” Pulkit Chhabra, Evenflow’s co-founder & VP Acquisitions said.
Globally, third-party sellers on Amazon crossed $300 billion in GMV and are expected to reach $650 billion in GMV by 2025. While they have robust product portfolios, they do not have the expertise and capital to scale, where e-commerce aggregators become enablers. In 2020, over
700,000 sellers signed up on Amazon India, making it the highest among any Amazon marketplace globally.
With sports, kitchen and gardening highly under-penetrated categories in the country, Evenflow plans to build them into strong brands in a market which is largely unorganised with widening gap between market leaders and others.
