Yesterday, we wrote about how niche ecommerce companies like Lenskart, furniture etailer Urban Ladder, and jewelry estore Bluestone have been coming up fast in India, as people get more comfortable buying a variety of products online. Now, another niche player, Purplle has raised an undisclosed amount in series A funding from IvyCap Ventures. This ecommerce site focuses on the beauty and grooming vertical.
Purplle was founded by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) grads Manish Taneja and Rahul Dash.
Taneja grew up in Faridabad, near Delhi, and went to IIT Delhi for Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, while Dash grew up in Bhubaneswar in the state of Orissa and went to IIT Kharagpur and then to Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad. The two were flatmates when Taneja was working with private equity firm Fidelity, which involved evaluating and investing in consumer tech businesses, while Dash was toying with an online furniture marketplace idea. “We used to discuss these business models all the time and that’s how Purplle germinated. We worked on it for six months before quitting and starting up,” Manish Taneja tells Tech in Asia.
The duo launched Purplle from Mumbai in 2011, and soon bagged seed funding from Blume Ventures, Mumbai Angels, and Chennai Angels. Now, with fresh funds, they’re poised to scale up rapidly this year.
Besides buying products on Purplle, users can also compare products based on several parameters, including ratings, colors, and prices. Also, you can compare salons and spas in your neighborhood based on reviews, pictures, and distance from your location. Purplle’s first mobile app will be out in a few weeks. It will have a different app for salons. That will be released next month, Taneja tells us.
More and more Indian shoppers are now loosening purse strings online. And as ecommerce is gaining momentum, great design, photos, and curation are turning out to be key influencers in the buying decision. Purplle wants to get that right.
Taneja says his team made a lot of mistakes initially with images and content on the site but learned from them. “Now, we are very focused on simple design. Pictures make a big difference. Our design team checks every image before it goes live on the platform,” he says.
He is building a “full-fledged content management system” to avoid design mistakes in future.
Solution-oriented and hyperlocal
Purplle already has a few strong competitors. Beauty ecommerce portal Nykaa, founded by an investment banker-turned-entrepreneur Falguni Nayar, Mumbai-based BeautyKafe, and Birchbox-style FabBag are a few. Apart from these vertical-focused companies, broader ecommerce marketplaces like Flipkart, Amazon, and Snapdeal too offer a wide range of beauty and grooming products.
With such fierce competition, it is hard to stand out, but Taneja believes Purplle’s focus gives it an edge over others. “Having a wide range of products is not a solution to all needs of customers. It only serves the customers who are well-informed and know what they want to buy. For others, there is a lot of value in discovery and curation. We think we will do this better because of our razor sharp focus on this category,” he says.
We believe the exact consumer pain point [in beauty ecommerce] is not access, quick delivery, or catalog of products or services but how a consumer connects to the right product or service personalized for him/her. Purplle.com enables this discovery. The key insight we drew from customer behavior on the site was that customers wanted solutions to their problems. They did not want a particular product or a particular service. We believe we are addressing this in a hyperlocal manner.
Taneja says Purplle has a million monthly active users and has tie-ups with more than 7,000 salons, spas, and skin and hair care stores across Mumbai. It plans to find 50,000 partners across 30 Indian cities and end this year with GMV (gross merchandize value) of US$30 to 40 million.
What excites him and Dash most about scaling Purplle is the quintessential thrill of starting up – “the ability to build something bottom up.” Born to middle class parents who held jobs with India’s public sector enterprises, “both of us never believed that we could come this far in our endeavor,” Taneja says. “With our current scale and resources, we are all the more excited to make it big.”
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This post Two IIT grads hit a Purplle patch with beauty ecommerce, bag series A funding appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Two IIT grads hit a Purplle patch with beauty ecommerce, bag series A funding
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