Morepen Labs completes acquisition of Lifespring; hands advertising account to HTA

Morepen Labs, which acquired the Lifespring brand for Rs 12 crore yesterday, has taken on the services of HTA to handle its advertising account on a monthly retainership basis. Kartik Raina, managing director, Dr Morepen, told agencyfaqs!, "HTA has worked on the new logo of Lifespring. Lifespring is not an account that needs mass-media coverage. The emphasis is going to be more on local promotions. However, we will leverage our programmes produced in-house for Delhi FM. The programme dubbed Dr Morepen's Non-Stop Zindagi is aired everyday from 7.00 pm to 8.00 pm."

The acquisition of Lifespring, the retail store brand promoted by Total Care Pvt Ltd (a 50:50 joint venture between the Jatia Group and Bodium International), was completed yesterday. As things stand now, Morepen Labs will have 95 per cent stake in Lifespring, and the remaining 5 per cent will be with the original owners Total Care. Post acquisition, Total Care will continue its association with Morepen Labs by working as consultants for Lifespring for the next two years. Morepen has decided to retain the brand name Lifespring as it enjoys tremendous brand recall in the market. Lifespring will now be promoted as a sub-brand of Dr Morepen.

With the acquisition the entire team of Lifespring moves to Morepen Labs, which has started looking for professionals with retail experience to beef up the team. Currently there are six Lifespring stores in Delhi - one each at South Extension, Greater Kailash 1, Basant Lok, Rajouri Garden, Karol Bagh and IP Extension. The task before Morepen Labs now is to spread the chain across the country. Morepen Labs has set a turnover target of Rs 10 crore-Rs 15 crore for the health and lifestyle chain, which clocked Rs 8 crore last fiscal.

For Morepen Labs moving from production to marketing and extending the business to retailing was always part of the strategy. "Lifespring is about health and lifestyle and Dr Morepen too is about health and lifestyle. So there was common ground. Morepen Labs' first attempt at getting close to the consumer was through mass retail production, which happened through Dr Morepen. We have gone one step ahead. We would now interact with the consumers directly through the chain," said Raina.

On his part, Mahesh Patel, director, Total Care Pvt Ltd, elaborated on the reason to sell off Lifespring. "The plan was to set up the pilot business and assess the viability. Once the business became workable, we decided to sell it off. We have a lot of businesses offshore and we do not have the time and the energy to overlook all the operations. In India we were on the look out for a serious partner for Lifespring. And Morepen was our choice because they came across as a company which was serious about retailing rather than picking on Lifespring as an investment opportunity," Patel said.

Post acquisition, all Lifespring stores will have a special visibility counter of Dr Morepen, which will stock all the sub-brands of the company. Now that Lifespring is part of Dr Morepen's brand portfolio, changes in brand communication of the retail chain are inevitable. As stated before the task will be handled by HTA, Delhi, one of Dr Morepen's empanelled agencies (the other two being Bates India and O&M). The alignment, however, was not the result of a pitch. © 2002 agencyfaqs!