The fashion e-commerce marketplace is buzzing with activity, with no end to the startups that are being launched. We speak to Harsh Shah of Fynd, a mobile shopping app that helps one discover and buy lifestyle products from brand stores.
What's your story? What made you go in for a fashion startup, given that the fashion ecosystem is one that sees the most ruthless competition possible?
Yes, fashion ecosystem has seen a lot of players coming in online as well as offline, but none of the frameworks target towards bridging the gap between online and ecosystems. Without taking any names, there are a couple of online brands which tried to get their hands on establishing an omni-channel network but gave up on it and soon started concentrating on the sales of only their private labels as this helps them fetch more profits. We started off with a single motive and that is to help brands optimise their current resources and still stand by it. We help the brands get their in-store inventory online on our portal and gain extra sales via it. We are currently the only player in the e-commerce industry which is fetching live inventory via 8,000+ stores across the country and this makes us the largest omni-channel e-commerce company in India.
How comfortably funded are you? You need to have deep pockets to cut through the clutter, build a brand, and ensure financial viability too.
We are currently backed by a pool of well-known investors in the industry and are funded well enough to scale up the company comfortably. Apart from that, since we make a profit on every order, therefore, financially it becomes much easier for us to sustain and growdespite such tough competition from the bigger players in the market.
How have you worked out your supply chain? What is the process that helps you zero in on the right vendors?
We are a true marketplace and don't hold any inventory of our own. All we need to set in the entire supply chain is to set up a proper process and keep a check on it for a smooth execution and timely delivery of the product. Once an order is placed, we look out for the product in a store which is nearest to the customer's delivery location and then signal it to that brand store and our delivery partner. The brand store keeps the product ready which is then picked up by the delivery partner and delivered to the customer. This setup helps us to offer the fastest delivery possible and optimise on our supply chain and operations. Reaching out to the right vendors is dependent on a lot of things. The most important of that being the brand's capability of streaming live inventory to us (so that we show only the items which are available in the brand store). Secondly, we need to fill category gaps on the website, so if tomorrow we see that there aren't many items in "sling bags" then we can put our focus on onboarding brands which have a good collection of sling bags.
Biggies like Amazon and Flipkart have a stranglehold over the fashion e-commerce space. Them apart, there are innumerable online fashion stores. How can you possibly cut through the clutter, and maintain your own bottom line as it were?
Our key advantage over any other e-commerce player is that we hold no inventory of our own. It means we have no fixed costs and scaling up becomes a lot easier for us. Apart from that, since we source all our inventory straight via the brand stores, one can see only the latest products which are available in the brand stores; no old season stocks at all. This is something which none of our competitors can offer. Both these key advantages help us in easy scaling and till maintaining unit economics of the game.
The fashion ecosystem is quite unlike any other. The farm-to-fashion supply chains are one of the most intricate in the world, and as they say: the more knowledge you have of this ecosystem, the more likely is your chance of success. So, how much of a fashion background do you and your core team have?
Fynd isn't our first product. We started off as Shopsense in 2012 building a solution for fashion retail stores to make their stores more interactive and a person can easily try different products of the brand virtually on a screen. This is where we started from and we have gained a lot of experience over the last four years in the fashion industry. We understand the trend is moving towards fast fashion and that is exactly what we are able to offer to our customers.
Where do you see yourself by December 2017?
Our goal for the next 12 months is to onboard as many brands as possible and plug in the store data from all current brands onboard as well. This will help us have an intense product range to choose from. By December 2017, we see having onboard more than 750+ brands and fetching data from around 50,000 stores around India. We see ourself acquiring a significant chunk of market share in the e-commerce industry and retaining more strongly the position of nation's largest store powered e-commerce portal.
Published on: 30/01/2017
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
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