Urban Ladder plans huge investment to push offline stores

Online furniture retailer Urban Ladder, which opened its first brick-and-mortar store in Bengaluru a few days ago, plans to invest $10 million over the next 12-18 months to set up offline stores in multiple formats across the country. Started five years ago as a pure e-commerce play, the company changed its positioning this year after a laggard few years clocking flat sales. Now the company plans to open about 15 physical stores in the top Indian cities. And this is certainly a big business opportunity for the signage companies whose activities include in-shop branding and graphic designs.