All Dressed Up
LimeRoad's unique social
shopping thrust makes it a potential unicorn -as well as a potential
acquisition target for an ecommerce horizontal
Founders will give you
various reasons for starting up their ventures, but few will mention “utter
frustration“ as one of them. In 2010, while flipping through a glossy magazine
after the birth of her second child in London, Suchi Mukherjee, one of the
three cofounders of LimeRoad, glanced upon a piece of jewellery made by a small
store in Mumbai. Enamoured, Mukherjee tried to buy it but couldn't as it was
not accessible. “I realised that there was no con sumer technology play that
made discovery of lovely products easy and entertaining,“ she recalls, adding
that absence of a place from where one could access the vast array of products
made in South East Asia left her exasperat ed. That's how LimeRoad, a social
shopping portal focused on women and fashion was founded, says Mukherjee, along
with Ankush Mehra and Prashant Malik.
LimeRoad claims that there
are 20,000 sellers on its platform, its gross merchandise has jumped 600% over
the last 12 months, the scrapbooking community has increased from 30,000 to
75,000 over the past year and the 3 million style statements posted as scrapbooks
amount to over 100 times growth in less than a year, and it has increased its
headcount from 50 to 450 in three years.
Small wonder, the startup
has managed to raise $50 million in three rounds of funding so far and counts
Tiger Global, Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners as its investors.
But is the business model
scalable enough to make LimeRoad a potential unicorn? Mukherjee thinks so,
since nearly half of online shoppers are women in India, and shopping is more
of a behavioural attribute, she says.“LimeRoad, being a women's only discovery
platform, is the only player in Indian ecommerce to have grown 600% in the last
one year,“ she asserts.
The use of technology is
what differentiates LimeRoad from other players in the market, she contends, as
she rattles out the numbers. Consumers come back on an average 84 times a year
on the app, with conversion rates to buying hovering at 8% per month. LimeRoad
has always managed a super thin fixed cost structure, using technology to
scale, she adds for good measure.
Another feature that
differentiates LimeRoad from its rivals is user-generated content. Mukherjee
believes that for women, lifestyle product access and discovery is a huge
problem, particularly given the long tail in options across categories.
LimeRoad, she claims, provides the most extensive discovery plat form, where
consumers come because they get to discover simply great products at affordable
prices. “We do this by not merely loading products on a platform, like most old
school marketplaces, but by making them discoverable through user-generated
content,“ she says.
What is more, Tiger Global,
one of the investors in LimeRoad, is also a top investor in Flipkart. Does
Mukherjee lose sleep over the prospect of being acquired or merged into another
fashion startup at some stage, what with inves tors likely to consolidate their
portfolio over the next few months? Mukherjee doesn't rule it out. “Everything
is al ways a possibility -to be acquired or acquire a company.
Our goal is to reach out to
every single woman in this coun try and convert her into a LimeRoad user,“ she
says.
ETM3JAN16
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