The SSI Group., the country’s leading specialty retailer owned by the Tantoco family, said Tuesday it expects sales from e-commerce platform to account for 15 percent to 20 percent of total sales over the next three years.
SSI Group president Anton Huang said in a virtual press briefing that the company would launch on Nov. 6 Trunc.ph, a multi-brand e-commerce site featuring some of the group’s most well-known brands in an online destination.
Huang said the company’s move to launch a multi-brand digital platform would strengthen its brick-and-mortar operations which posted a significant decline in terms of sales because of the pandemic.
“The group’s ability to innovate and its ability to adapt, on top of the robust operating and financial foundation that it has built over the last few years, will drive our accelerated e-commerce strategy, as we seek to increase the number of channels through which our customers can interact with us,” Huang said.
“The group believes that our compelling brand portfolio allows us to create a unique set of e-commerce properties that can be further differentiated from other e-commerce offerings through integration with our brick and mortar store network,” he said.
Huang said Trunc.ph is a first-of-its-kind digital portal by the SSI Group, which would feature high-end luxury and casual brands and a diverse range of home essentials, beauty products and colored cosmetics.
Huang said the company began to see signs of recovery as some brands posted higher sales in October compared to the same month last year.
He said while most of the company’s store expansion plans were put on hold because of the pandemic, the company planned to resume its expansion plans in 2021.
He said the SSI Group would continue to build on its position as the brick-and-mortar specialty retailer with the widest and most diverse e-commerce presence, through the launch of brands on multiple digital channels—on brand.com sites, on third-party marketplaces such as Rustans.com, Zalora and Lazada and on the group’s own multi-brand marketplaces.
SSI Group was operating a network of 583 stores with gross selling space of 116,596 square meters as of June 2020.