Unacademy opens first offline store in New Delhi

Bengaluru, March 11

Edtech unicorn Unacademy opened its first offline experience store in the country and has plans to open three more in 6-8 weeks.

The first Unacademy Store will officially open on March 12 at Pusa Road, New Delhi. The company has plans to establish similar touchpoints across the country starting with Kota, Jaipur and Lucknow as the next phase of the initiative. All the four locations are popular hubs for test-prep in India.

Speaking to BusinessLine, Karan Shroff, Partner and CMO, Unacademy, said, “India does have a trust element when you are present offline as a brand and we wanted to have that with our learners. We wanted to be closer and more accessible to them. Second intent behind opening these stores is that we wanted them to experience the product. So, students can walk into the store today, there are about 20-30 devices that are present at the stores and they have their headsets attached to the devices as well, for students to experience a live class.”

Further, the stores will also hold on-ground counselling with experts and frequent meetings with top educators and other elements to expand learners’ knowledge about their chosen goals. Students can also purchase subscriptions at the Unacademy store.

“The journey which started with a Youtube channel to democratise high-quality knowledge for everyone is taking a new shape with our Unacademy Stores today. With these Stores, we are taking a step forward towards creating a community of like-minded Learners. We hope these experiential stores with expert and educator connects, libraries, classrooms, and much more will help Learners gain significant insights into their chosen career paths. We have received tremendous feedback on our products and services, and recognise that a physical experiential touchpoint will benefit them in the long term by fostering trust and confidence,” said Gaurav Munjal, Co-Founder and CEO, Unacademy Group

In-house library

Unacademy Stores will also have an in-house library is furnished with relevant reading resources that help Learners to stay updated in their chosen fields; classrooms, where the company plans to host sessions with educators from various categories for all learners., merchandise wall which will have merch such as apparel, stationery, etc available for purchase, and select Unacademy stores will also have a functional cafeteria allowing learners to plan extended schedules at the store.

Edtech major, BYJU’S recently announced the launch of BYJU’S tuition centers, which is a hybrid classroom offering classes for 4-10 and said it will invest $200 million in these offline centers. While, Unacademy did not disclose the investment amount planned for its experience stores, Shroff noted that hybrid model is an option that Unacademy could explore, if learners’ ask for it.

“We are always focused on the learners, let’s say in the future, the learners come back and say, offline classes is something that we want at the stores. Then this is an option we could explore over the weekends or create a hybrid model. That said, the focus and intent for us is to stay online. We believe that online is the future, we believe that online has significantly more benefits, in terms of students from remote areas getting access to top educators. So keeping that in mind, the intent is to give them an experience at the store, educate them on how this empowers them or enables them in their journey,” he added.

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