After being a digital brand for over ten years, Joker & Witch is now opening physical stores. The founders say this is the most important step the company has taken so far. The Indian brand, known for its watches and jewelry, plans to grow its number of stores in a careful way. Their goal is for store sales to make up over half of their total income in the future.
Joker & Witch started with its first store last December at Lulu Mall in Central Bengaluru, and then opened another one at M5 Mall in Electronic City. Because things are going well, they want to open 10 to 20 more stores this year, and then increase that to 30 to 50 stores next year. They’re paying for this expansion with their own earnings, which shows that they have a good amount of cash and are growing in a way that doesn’t waste money in India’s fast-growing online shopping scene.
According to the people who started the company, Satish Singh and Maya Varma, they always planned to open stores, but they wanted to wait for the right time. Their choice is based on what they’ve learned from their online customers, who have shown a lot of interest in their products in big cities, smaller cities, and even some smaller towns. This way of using online information to decide where to open stores is becoming more common among Indian online brands as they create a physical presence.
Right now, Joker & Witch is focusing on smaller stores that are 200 to 500 square feet in size, mostly in popular malls. The plan is to take advantage of the large number of people who visit these malls and the marketing that the malls do to help bring in customers without spending a lot of money on advertising. They might consider opening stores on main streets later, but for now, they think malls are the easiest way to grow their business in India.
They’ve set aside ₹2–4 crore to open 10–20 stores, but this might change by 15–20 percent depending on where the stores are and how much it costs to get them ready. They want to run things carefully, so they’re aiming for each store to start making a profit within 15 months. All the stores they open this year will be owned by the company. They’ll only start thinking about franchising after they’ve worked out all the details of how their stores work.
Joker & Witch sells almost 4,500 different watches and pieces of jewelry. In their stores, they display about 9–10 percent of these items, but customers can still access everything online. Watches bring in about two-thirds of their income, while jewelry makes up one-third. However, they sell more jewelry because it costs less, and this is also true in their physical stores.
The first results from their stores have been positive. People spend about 10 percent more in stores than they do online, because they buy more items at once. Online, people usually buy about 2.1 items, but in stores, they buy between 2.4 and 2.6 items. This is because store employees can help customers and people are more likely to buy things they see in person, which are big advantages for lifestyle brands like Joker & Witch in India.
The company thinks that store sales will make up about 20 percent of their total income by 2027, but they want that number to be even higher in the long run. In the next three years, Joker & Witch wants store sales to account for over half of their business. They’ll continue to have a strong presence in Bengaluru, with plans for one or two more stores there. They’re also considering opening stores in Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Vizag, Chennai, Kochi, Chandigarh, Noida, Indore, Gurgaon, and Lucknow.
Joker & Witch expects to end this year with a total income of ₹130–140 crore, and then ₹170–180 crore next year. They’re also aiming to keep their profit margins at around 10 percent. As we see more and more online brands opening physical stores in India, Joker & Witch’s careful and well-planned expansion is a good example of how to grow an online business in a responsible way.
