Naina Grover (name changed), a style-conscious, 18-something teenager from Bangalore, wants to give it her best shot at the upcoming freshers? party in college. She checks her purse, but realises she has just a little over R1,500 to spare to jazz up her wardrobe. Beauty comes at a price?Grover should know, considering her middle-class family background and the money that high-end brands and professional stylists command in today?s world.
So what does she do?
Enter 20Dresses.com, an online ?personal stylist?. Based on her ?behaviour? across over 50 attributes, which includes her likes, what she buys, colour choices and offline comments, the website recommends her a top for R495, a peplum skirt for R657 and accessories like earrings/cuffs worth R350. The portal completes her get-up by helping her pair the items with a pair of shoes and a broad belt from her own personal wardrobe.
?Similarly, a lot of our customers ask us to help them in reworking their existing wardrobes in a more trendy and fashionable way. In such cases, we recommend one or two products, like a printed denim to pair with a sheer black top in their wardrobe or a statement necklace from our accessories? collection to compliment a classic white shirt they own but don?t know how to style. It?s a combination of adding, pairing and adapting two wardrobes, their personal collection and their personal showroom,? says Sneha Singh, a stylist with 20Dresses.com.
Web portals like 20Dresses.com have opened up a whole new world of decision-making, one where we sit with our laptops and choose from thousands of items/services on offer. They have also helped users like Grover tell them what looks good on them, what they should wear, which accessories they can match their clothes with, and so on. These ?24×7? personal stylists handpick the best clothes for the buyer based on his/her body type and style preferences. They also provide instant recommendations from stylists on what kind of clothes will suit the buyer, how to wear them and what to pair them with. Additionally, they also give tips on what to wear from the customer?s personal wardrobe.
Voonik.com, which was started by Sujayath Ali and Navaneetha Krishnan, has a team of five people?two developers and three stylists. Visitors to the site can check the products on the site and based on recommendations by professional stylists, they can also purchase these at the lowest prices.
?At Voonik, we are changing the way people purchase apparels. We enable them to purchase items the right way based on their body type and style preferences, and have professional stylists assisting them to make this happen,? says Ali. The founders are targeting the Indian online apparel and lifestyle market, which is pegged at $500 million, growing at 40% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
Ali is an Indian School of Business (ISB) alumnus and worked at Visa as vice-president and Amazon as the senior product manager prior to Voonik. Krishnan has over 12 years of start-up experience as a garage-stage employee at Zoho, Aryaka and Fresh Desk.
While they do recommend style and clothes, there is no need for a user to upload his/her picture or video because the Voonik team relies on data analysis to come up with answers. While registering, the user has to just answer a short, 30-second visual quiz and the team instantly starts recommending suitable items for the user. The Voonik team also keeps a track of a customer?s behaviour while he/she is online, such as what items they click on and where they spend more time, which, in turn, helps them predict the user?s preferences.
?We learn about the user through every mouse-click and mouse-over, and start refining the recommendations. We also have the option of uploading the photo of the user if he or she asks for specific recommendations,? explains Ali. Voonik has Bhavya Chawla, Sheetal Bahirat and Apurva Solanki as stylists, who bring decades of experience in personal styling.
Voonik has got 3,35,000 visits on their site since its launch in March and has close to 18,000 registered users and 39,000 Facebook fans. The site mostly attracts women, aged between 18 and 30. Though they also cater to men, women have been at the forefront of adopting the services. Ali says they sold about 1,100 items in August. ?We are growing 100% month-on-month since our launch. We want to reach R1 crore sales per month by March 2014,? adds Ali.
For 20Dresses.com, which was launched in October last year, the idea came about after over six months of on-ground research. Sumant Kasliwal, founder and CEO of 20Dresses, realised that most customers dislike huge and cluttered listing of products when they log in to any e-commerce site. To give the right recommendations to its individual members, they developed an algorithm-based artificial intelligence system called FI (Fashion Intelligence), which incorporates both a style expert?s inputs as well as the member?s preferences.
?20Dresses.com is a membership service, where we assess the fashion profiles of our individual members throughout their association with us. Once we have their basic information, our proprietary recommendation engine, FI, gets to work. It tracks our members? behaviour across over 50 attributes, which includes their likes, what they buy, colour choices, offline comments, etc. As interaction with members increase, FI?s understanding of their preferences gets better, resulting in more accurate recommendations,? says Kasliwal.
They have two in-house senior style experts in Alka Vyas, a fashion graduate from BD Somani Institute of Fashion Design, Mumbai, and Sneha Singh, a fashion postgraduate from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Delhi.
StyleCracker.com, which was launched in June, also provides similar services. They do not sell any of their own products and encourage users to upload items of clothing they already own into their private ?dressing room?. They had over a thousand sign-ups in the first week of their launch and are adding a similar number week-on-week since then.
?Our users take a 30-second personality assessment and upload at least one photo of themselves while registering. We then style our users and answer any style-related question within five minutes,? says Dhimaan Shah, co-founder and managing director of StyleCracker.com. In addition to their online styling platform, they even style celebrities and do editorial work, weddings or any other personal style-related work.
While Voonik sells several brands like Aurelia, Alma, Anouk, Biba, Entropy, Femella, Faballey, Harpa, Gritstones, Kira, Shree, Miss Bennett, etc, on their site, 20Dresses does not sell third-party brands. The majority of 20Dresses? apparel merchandise comes from its own manufacturing under the brand, 20D, whereas other things, including fashion jewellery and accessories, are sourced and curated from across the world. StyleCracker refers its users to online and offline stores, brands and retailers.
When it comes to advertising and marketing, most of these sites rely heavily on social media networks like Facebook as their primary channel. However, to cater to more people, StyleCracker is planning to come up with some comprehensive approach to advertise their brand. ?We do not currently employ a single PR person, leave alone having tie-ups with any magazines. However, we have a number of very interesting items in the pipeline and will be announcing them soon,? says Shah.
One major hurdle these websites have faced in their progress so far is the negative perception about e-commerce. In fact, Kasliwal of 20Dresses feels e-commerce is the greatest disruption to retail business. But with changing times, he says, businesses like this will be the next generation of e-commerce, where focus will be more on customer experience and unit economics. ?We are currently under-serving our demand by over three times. That says a lot about the potential for businesses like ours. And I would say that we are just warming up,? adds Kasliwal.