Escaro Royale CEO Ambud Sharma eyes global $30B luxury e-commerce through US expansion

Ambud Sharma, one of India’s well-known fashion-tech entrepreneurs, and CEO of Escaro Royale has revealed the concept of “fast luxury” and related aggressive expansion plans. Ambud was appointed as the Chief Executive of the luxury brand by the board of directors in late 2017. Since then, Escaro Royale has made significant investments in the direct-to-consumer technologies.  Initially focussing primarily on selling super-premium hand-patina leather shoes through their ecommerce website www.escaro.in , Escaro Royale has since then expanded to several other luxury menswear sub-categories.  With order value between $150-500, Escaro Royale is among the few brands of Indian origin who have been able to command that price point from not only indian, but also, global audiences.

“Think about this concept as ART meeting TECH. When we started strategizing Escaro Royale’s growth, our mission statement was to sell premium products under a private label from an independent ecommerce platform at premium prices without deep discounting in a price-sensitive country like India. We thought that if we could achieve success in THAT mission statement, we would easily be able to expand across the world profitably.”, says Mr. Sharma.

Today,  Escaro Royale ships its products worldwide and has served over 10,000 customers outside of India. The positive response from the West has encouraged the brand to expand to the United States first, and then to Europe in late 2021. According to Sumit Bhardwaj, Vice President of Escaro Royale - “Our plans have been delayed by about 5 months due to COVID, but we are well-poised to cover the ground through more aggressive international expansion campaigns. We are very excited about this opportunity.”

When asked about the concept of Fast Luxury, Mr Sharma said, “We are a luxury ecommerce company. But generally luxury companies are limited in the number of seasons they launch per year (generally 2 or 3). We are launching 16 new designs every 30 days in order to ensure superior freshness in our offerings. This also allows us to A/B test our design hypothesis and provide product-mix corrections at breakneck speeds. We are able to do this only because each subsystem in the company is integrated with technology - from design to delivery. Our target is to get so good at this fast luxury concept that we are able to launch 100s of designs each month.”

Escaro Royale has risen to prominence through their customer first promise and exquisite men’s luxury handcrafted shoes and accessories ranges. While many others have attempted this space in India, only a few have been able to hold their ground (profitably) in the rather price sensitive Indian market. The United States, on the other hand, is seen as a value centric market that doesn’t mind paying if the product and service is worth it. This is precisely why the CEO feels that the product offering and technology will do wonders in the US.

“Escaro Royale is a technology company that also sells products”, says Ambud with a grin. “We are focussed on providing the very best customer experience through UX innovations. We believe that our secret weapon is the powerful 3C approach - Consumer (experience), Consistency and Content. We have been successful in building a customer-experience focussed content-driven brand that is far more consistent in quality and craftsmanship than any other brand in its class”

Ambud holds a Masters degree in technology management from one of the premiere US institutes. Escaro Royale started as an experiment to understand how luxury brands operated in the tech-first world of ecommerce. That experiment has flourished into a full blown tech-focussed luxury brand. The brand is now leveraging AI and ML technologies to find, groom and retain customers from across the globe.

Escaro Royale is currently bootstrapped with profit reinvestments but is inviting various PE  investors to raise funds to fuel its global ambitions. With technology at its core, strong data analytics and 100% in-house marketing, the company is solidly placed to raise $20 million over the next couple of years.

“We are building a platform that will act as a luxury data highway in future for global luxury brands to plug and play. Envision onboarding an entire catalogue of a luxury label in 30 minutes and pushing the sales through our platform within an hour of that. With the trust and reliability already in place, and the potential audience already aligned, it would be a breeze for any brand to launch with us within a day! That's the power of the luxury data highway we envision.”, exclaims Ambud.

Escaro Royale is now inviting mid-sized PE funds for a conversation about this high margin and high expansion opportunity. The team is sure that with the right partners, Escaro Royale will prove to be an excellent investment.

Disclaimer: The views, suggestions and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Forbes India journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.