Indonesia's Hypefast expands its portfolio to over 25 brands

Hypefast has partnered with top SEA-based e-commerce native brands and hyper scales the brands by bringing capital support, a best-in-class retail team, and a centralised retail ecosystem and infrastructure. The company acquires brands while keeping the original brand founders to maintain strong relevancy with local customers, Hypefast said in a press release.

Launched in January 2020, Hypefast has pioneered the e-commerce house of brands business model in Southeast Asia. The insight to start Hypefast came from the founding team's proximity to local e-commerce brands and the struggles these brands faced.

"There are very few reasons preventing SEA brands from growing into multi-million USD EBITDA. These brands already have access to cost-efficient manufacturers and a substantial market with strong e-commerce penetration. Most importantly, these local founders understand the needs and wants of the local consumer community much better than international competitors in terms of style, size, fit, aesthetics and price point," said Achmad Alkatiri, founder and CEO of Hypefast.

"I started Hypefast after spending more than six years working closely with local brand founders and seeing their struggles accessing the right talent, capital, scale and operational efficiency - all of which are tied to each other. Hypefast is excited to be growing the local e-commerce brands ecosystem in Southeast Asia along with the amazing local brand founders we have been fortunate to partner with," Alkatiri continued.

Unlike the 'acquire fast and acquire many' strategy that brand aggregators in other markets implement, Hypefast is laser focused on quality rather than quantity. Hypefast spends significantly more effort post acquisition, on delivering growth through its end-to-end retail team, technology, efficient processes, market insights, economies of scale and centralised back-end operations optimisation.

To date, Hypefast has raised more than $22 million of equity and debt capital from top SEA and global investors to take the company one step closer to its overall vision. Investors today include Monk's Hill Ventures, Jungle Ventures, Strive, Arkblu Capital, and Amand Ventures, the release added.

"Hypefast is at the vanguard of e-commerce 2.0 in Southeast Asia - a shift towards brand- and seller-centric buying. The increasingly sophisticated digital consumer in Southeast Asia cares about whom she buys from and who else is buying. Hypefast is building the foremost digital platform that will empower emerging brand owners and entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia to hypercharge their businesses," said Kuo-Yi Lim, co-founder and managing partner at Monk's Hill Ventures.

"Jungle is proud to have invested in Hypefast multiple times since leading their seed round in early 2020. Our excitement continues to grow because Hypefast's mission-driven founding team is deeply focused on creating a large house of brands in partnership with so many amazing and creative local brand founders. It is because of this aligned goal that we believe Hypefast management has been able to partner rapidly with more than 25 brands already," Yash Sankrityayan, principal at Jungle Ventures, said.

Hypefast currently has more than 200 team members across Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand to support the business by pushing brand growth across channels and markets.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)