Ex-Alibaba director raises $3.2 million for his fashion startup in just five months of launch

Gurugram-based Mayfair, which offers affordable fashion including clothing, accessories and home and living products, has raised $3.2 million from tier one investors in India and China — Nexus Venture Partners and CDH Investments. The startup was launched by former director at Alibaba Eddie Deng and data science executive at Club Factory and Google Chi Xue.

“We have faith in Mayfair team to strengthen its supply chain, expand product offerings and further improve fulfilment experiences to its customers after fundraising,” said Damien Zhang, Vice President, CDH Investments in a company statement.

However, what quite unusual about Mayfair and doesn’t happen often in Indian startup ecosystem is raising a bigger cheque relative to the time spent in business. In just five months (launched in October 2018), Mayfair has managed to raise that much amount. Startups usually begin with less than $1 million in around a year’s time since their launch before jumping onto Series A level.

“They must have shown very high promise with respect to competition but they should be given respect for the fact that they have been able to sell their business plan well. Many small businesses would take a lot of time to raise that money but also because it is a technology intensive business, the startup has been able to raise the amount. It is not normal for startups to raise that much early on unless they are really good at it,” Naresh T Raisinghani, CEO and Executive Director at India division of global consulting firm BMGI told Financial Express Online.

Moreover, with established players like Myntra, fashion is a tried-and-tested model that works particularly for youngsters given India’s young demographics, said Raisinghani.

Technology is certainly one of the key selling point for Mayfair. Unlike other traditional fashion brands, Mayfair uses big data to translate user demand along with lifestyle trend into actionable insights. “So our suppliers are able to turn them (insights) into unique design with good quality in a short turnaround time,” said Chi Xue, Co-founder, Mayfair.

The actionable insights refers to anticipating what a customer wants and developing a search pattern using these technologies, similar to Google, Amazon etc., that would show same or similar products that user searched for.

“Mayfair’s data driven approach will enable making fashion affordable to the masses,” said Pratik Poddar, Vice President, Nexus Venture Partners.

Mayfair will deploy the capital towards boosting its procurement and operations as well as hiring.