E-commerce roll-up startup, 10club, acquires three D2C home-gardening brands

E-commerce roll-up player, 10club, has acquired three direct to consumer (D2C) gardening brands, Kraftseeds, Gate Garden and Kriti Kalash. The brands specialise in seeds, soil, flower bulbs, manure, planters, tools and every other kind of equipment a consumer might need for their home gardening needs. The company is also looking to acquire six more D2C brands amid a heightened competition in the Thrasio-style startup space with Mensa brands already entering the unicorn club within six months.   The startup said that the home gardening category has seen an unprecedented spike during the pandemic, as people stayed home and looked for ways to make their homes feel fresh, while cultivating hobbies that relieve stress.   10club believes that this trend is here to stay and aims at focusing its energies on capitalising on the growth in this category. The company estimated that the current category size is about $900 million with less than 10 per cent online penetration, growing at over 70 per cent YOY in 2020-2021.   10club co-founder and COO Deepak Nair said that his startup is extremely bullish on the home category and the acquisition of three strong brands in the lawn and garden segment gives the e-commerce roll-up firm a strong foothold and more importantly will complement the six new acquisitions that they will announce shortly. “With these acquisitions, we will be clocking a revenue of over $50mn in the home category alone,” Nair added.   D2C brands in India which were earlier selling through platforms like Amazon, Flipkart were lacking the capital and infrastructure to scale. The growth of e-commerce roll-up startups in India on the lines of the popular US-based unicorn, Thrasio, has accelerated opportunities for brands who wish to supply directly to consumers online.   10club said that the founders of the brands Kraftseeds, Gate Garden and Kriti Kalash saw promise and potential in their business almost two decades earlier. “Regardless of the challenges of a category that wasn’t as lucrative back then, they spent a considerable amount of time understanding preferences of the urban consumer and took this nascent business online via Amazon.   They developed an exceptional expertise in sourcing seeds and a strong network with farmers who could contract farm for them, customised to meet their requirements of seed varieties, seasonality, volume, and specific quality standards, enabling them to source the best quality seeds at the most reasonable prices,” stated a 10club spokesperson.   The startup said that over the years, the brands  expanded their product lines to include other products such as planters, soil, coco peat, gardening tools and flower bulbs. When COVID hit and the category saw a boom, they were not only equipped to cater the demand from a product mix perspective but the network they had spent years to build also paid off, it added.