What happens when an actor wants to use his passion for
fitness and health and translate it into something productive? For Hrithik
Roshan, that passion gave rise to HRX, his very own sports and fitness brand.
With the brand’s inception in 2012, HRX has a current run rate of Rs 120 crore.
From humble beginnings, the brand has made great progress in partnership with
online retail company Myntra with a current year on year
growth of 100%.
The brand was launched out of the increasing number of
people in India who are getting more fitness conscious. Today’s citizens are
exercising and dieting to be better and subsequently are putting in a lot of
effort to be fitter and look better. With HRX’s fitness quotient, it makes the
brand more agreeable to the consumer’s needs as they can relate to the brand
ideology and hence access it more to achieve their fitness goals. HRX has also
carved a niche for itself in a market that is quite contained, in the sense
that there are few but popular brands that serve this purpose in India.
Speaking at an interview with ET Now, Hrithik spoke in
detail about the plans for the brand and plans for its future. Joining him in
the interview was Ananth Narayanan, CEO of Myntra & Jabong. Hrithik said
that HRX plans to expand its categories to innerwear and sunglasses sometime
this year, in order to reach the brand’s desired target of 450-550 crores by
the year 2020. Besides these, HRX is also looking to expand its footwear line.
Aside from what they offer currently, they plan to expand the category 2x times
in order to have a wider range of footwear products available to customers as
well as invest in design and technology to keep up with current trends. HRX’s
current footwear portfolio has products that cater to people with flat feet and
knee problems, problems that Hrithik has faced as well. Hrithik also said that
he wanted to design footwear which focused on pronation correction which would vastly
improve support and stability for the athlete. New variants in the category
such as knit mesh range, memory foam range and athleisure collection are ideas
that are also being considered to be introduced. Aside from this, women’s
fitness category would also be an area where focus would be put in FY 2017-18.
HRX also plans to set afoot in the offline market with plans
of opening a new offline technologically driven store later this year. A
similar approach was taken by Roadster brand which opened its first technologically
driven offline store in Bangalore earlier this month, in partnership with
Myntra.
Incepting and executing a brand from a dream to reality has
been a very educational experience for Hrithik. During his interview, he spoke
about how the experience of having to sit, converse and explain his brand
vision to retail corporations has given him a unique perspective of a few of
the many challenges that entrepreneurs face in general.
Since 2016, when Myntra acquired majority stake in HRX, the
combined aim of the partnership has been to help HRX be a recognizable brand among its competitors in the Indian retail space. Currently, HRX is one of the
first homegrown Indian brands in the active lifestyle space and it is making
every effort to become the best among the lot. With regard to the partnership,
Myntra has helped HRX in a lot of ways including gaining larger footfalls,
obtaining larger volumes of consumer analytic data and a much greater marketing
presence. Myntra and HRX plan to take this partnership far beyond.
