10club, a Thrasio-style aggregator of third-party sellers on e-commerce platforms, has acquired its third sports-and-fitness brand in a bid to expand its footprint in this category, the company said in a statement on Monday.
Aurion, a sports and fitness equipment maker, joins 10club’s sports portfolio, which currently has Skudgear and Rapidtozz. The details of the transaction were not disclosed. 10club is betting on sports and fitness, which it believes is one of the fastest-growing categories in the country.
Aurion manufactures ankle weights, gym belts, medicine balls, dumbbells, skipping ropes among other fitness equipment. The company is based in Jalandar and was founded by brothers--Harkirat Singh and Satvinder Singh--who worked in a sports equipment factory before they founded Aurion.
“With its in-house product development capabilities and intrinsic understanding of the sports goods market, Aurion is well-positioned to achieve further scale in this category. We, at 10club, are very excited to partner with Satvinder and Harkirat in realising their dream of building a large ‘Made in India’ sports brand,” Deepak Nair, co-founder, chief operating officer, 10club, said in the statement.
While Aurion initially used to sell its products offline, it listed on Amazon in 2013, acknowledging the rising demand for going digital in a bid to expand its customer base. 10club said that the Singh brothers were of the opinion that customer feedback would drive product development, and thus wanted to build ‘progressive systems’ through customer reviews to plug loopholes, the statement said.
“We started by selling one product on Amazon years ago, and today we have built an enterprise that develops some of the highest-quality products in the sport category in India,” said the Singh brothers in the statement.
10club raised $40 million earlier this year in its Seed funding round, co-led by venture capital (VC) firm Fireside Ventures. The company has acquired six brands so far across sports and fitness, home décor, which includes lawn and gardening products and equipment, and baby product categories.
The company claims to have built a pipeline of more than $100 million and is looking to focus on categories like sports and fitness, baby products and pet products and services, it said. 10club recently acquired lawn and gardening brands--Kraftseeds, Gate Garden and Kriti Kalash.
