MUMBAI: BIGFlix Movie Rentals is planning a retail expansion via the franchise route. The company plans to touch the 150 stores mark by March 2011. BIGFlix.com will deliver movies at home to the people residing in Tier II cities, which will include Jaipur, Vadodara, Surat, Lucknow, Nasik, Jamshedpur, Kochi, Patna, Nagpur and Kanpur amongst others.
BIGFlix currently delivers movies to nine cities with a total retail presence of 60 stores and an access to approximately 21000 titles across 13 Indian languages. BIGFlix.com will engage local logistic partners best suited to the respective cities’ dynamics to deliver movies at home to the masses. The BIGFlix franchise business will have two models, namely, store franchise and master franchise. Store franchise, is where the interested party can become the franchise of a single store in any specific city and Master franchise, is where the interested party can opt for the franchise of a set number of stores for a specific geographic location.
BIGFlix.com chief lead – franchise operations Puneet Sachdeva said, "We are all geared up with the launch of our new expansion plans with the franchise route. While we will focus on the brand building and content acquisition aspects meeting with the specific requirements of the denizens residing in these cities, our franchisees will handle all the logistics and operations of the business. Considering that even today we see 75 – 80% of our registrations come from the offline route, and constant tremendous response in terms of enquiries / registrations on our website from these cities for our movie service, we are confident that franchise model will be the most feasible path at this stage. Currently we have a customer base of 80,000 customers and with the franchise foray we aim to reach a target of 1, 50, 000 customers by March 2011."
BIGFlix chief lead – online movie rentals Pankaj Chandra added, "With the franchise route we aim to focus on the core aspects of our business and also reach as many people as possible and satisfy their overall movie entertainment needs. We have done intense research with regards to the movie watching habits of the population in these cities and have fine tuned basic requirements like content, pricing etc so as to cater to their requirements at best. Also, coupled with our constant urge to provide seamless experience of watching movies at home and aggressive marketing strategies planned for these cities, we will for sure meet their entertainment needs capturing the minds of the common man."
BIGFlix Movie Rentals by now has 10 franchise stores in cities like Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Chandigarh, Faridabad and Panipat.
