"Love, Bonito" Closes Series C Funding, Strengthens Omnichannel and International Expansion

Startups direct-to-customer (DTC) from Singapore "Love, Bonito" announced the acquisition of series C funding of $50 million (over 700 million Rupiah) led by Primavera Capital Group, a global investment firm with Alibaba portfolio; ByteDance, Yum China, and Mead Johnson China, with participation from Ondine Capital and Adastria. This investment is Primavera's first portfolio for a startup in Southeast Asia.

This startup that focuses on women's fashion products plans to use the fresh funds to strengthen its strategy omnichannel and increasing international expansion in key markets to pursue triple-digit growth yoy. These key markets include Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States.

In the market existing, such as Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, Love, Bonito will double strategy omnichannel-his. While in other markets, such as Hong Kong, Japan, Philippines and US will start expansion omnichannel, new business verticals, strengthening local community engagement and key collaboration, and continuous optimization of user experience.

"I'm more excited than ever for what's to come in the next decade. The growth we're seeing today will not come from a team that consistently strives to support women in the various seasons of their lives. Being in the women's business has been our mission from day one, and we ended up venturing outside of fashion to support our offering," said Love's co-founder, Bonito Rachel Lim.

Love, Bonito known as brand 6th most popular fashion in Singapore, able to compete with brand other international. The company has operations and has teams in four other countries, including Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

In its business model, the company utilizes strategic omnichannel, which combines the shopping experience online (via app and website) and offline (has an outlet). As well as, offering a selection of fashion products that have been adapted to Asian postures.

In a virtual press conference held by the company today (27/10), Love's CEO, Bonito Dione Song explained the strategy omnichannel implemented are able to make the company's movement more flexible in innovating and launching new product categories such as children's clothes, lounge wear, intimates, and shoes, although the retail industry in general has been affected by Covid-19.

In the past year, he continued, the company has focused on international expansion which has proven to be able to grow positively. In the global market, outside of Singapore, as much as 50% of business comes from the site online. To date, it has achieved an overall growth of more than 120% yoy in the international market, and an overall growth of 208% for sales online.

The company believes the Asian diaspora community has enormous potential, especially in the US, where revenue growth online exceeded 1.200% yoy in September 2021. 

Song also revealed the company's performance over the past year. Revenue grew 62% yoy in the first semester of 2021 and EBITDA margin grew 2% in the same period. "We managed to become the number one largest DTC startup in Southeast Asia," said Song.

He further detailed that the fresh funds that have been obtained will be used mostly to launch international expansion actions. The strategy that will be carried out is to accelerate brand awareness and build communities, invest in forming international teams, deepen omnichannel presence in core and newer markets, win consumer experience through localization strategies.

For example, in the United States, for example, companies will start an initial strategy omnichannel by making pop up store in core cities, such as California and New York, and recruiting teams to take it more seriously and gain traction. The same strategy will also be applied to markets in Hong Kong and the Philippines.

Not only that, Love, Bonito plans to enrich its product catalog by entering new categories, such as sports, shoes, and accessories; go to category wellness; and, strengthening ecosystems and support, community (LBCommunity+), social impact (LBCreate, ESG), personalization and content (LiBrary). Some of the products above according to Song will be present next year.

"Active wear market currently growing very well, many local brands have entered there. But unique value What we offer always refers to three things, namely Asian-centric, female-centric for clothing design, and always build a strong community.”

Take full advantage data science

The community is an important part of Love, Bonito's journey, which has been established since 2005. According to the company's records, as many as 32% of consumers that the company acquired 10 years ago still shop at Love, Bonito. In addition, the annual customer retention rate is more than 65%, which is higher than the fashion industry average of 23%.

“That's why we launched LBCommunity+ in June 2020 to better appreciate the customers who have been with us. Counting, nearly 300k members at various levels to date have joined.”

Not only that, in terms of technology utilization data science also supports Love, Bonito's business processes to be more efficient and can create new orders. The company uses fashion design algorithms to track more than 100 design SKUs to increase predictive power to create the best designs.

Then, armed with rich and contextual data, capable of making Love, Bonito has a data warehouse "source of truth" a single tracked billions of data points over the last 11 years, and the customer journey through omnichannel data integration with 85% of customers tracked. Final, customer intelligence in the form of advanced analytics real-time and loop feedback that promotes sutomeric retention, as well as machine learning to automate customer segmentation and personalization.

"Data science very helpful for us in finding the point of accuracy that can ultimately increase sales. Consumers will get more accurate item recommendations according to their personalization," concluded Song.