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?
Kaizad Hansotia: Honestly, I never imagined starting up a business in the fashion space, I mean if you had asked me the same question two years back, I probably would have said no way. Precisely because of the same reason you mentioned, too much competition and little scope of innovation. But after I observed my sister and her many other designer friends, facing some real life problems in order to get their talent noticed and grow their customer base, it forced me to re-look at this industry as a whole, which ultimately changed my perspective towards the fashion ecosystem. Meeting so many fresh, young and emerging, independent, and even fairly established designers It made me realise their immense potential but they also faced a lot of problems like lack of capital, lack of technical and marketing expertise when it comes to growing their customer base. This is where the idea of GetNatty was born: leverage technology and human talent combined to explode the business potential of those hundreds of thousands of designers who make original products that are inspired in India and made for the world. That’s what GetNatty stands for. I am a management professional but more than that, I have been an entrepreneur all my life. I started my first business when I was 17 selling electronic rackets door-to-door and in just a matter of three months, we had made our first 1 lakh which I used to hire three of my buddies to work for me. There has been no looking back and I have started and closed several businesses ever since.
Harsh Shah: Yes, fashion ecosystem has seen a lot of players coming in on-line 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 their private labels only 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 8000+ stores across the country and this makes us the largest omni-channel e-commerce company in India.
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?
Kaizad Hansotia: Competition is the best thing that can happen to a startup. (a) Because it means that the market you are chasing is validated, and (b) because it means that there is enough demand in the market for multiple players to survive. Hence, any new and differentiated product or service offering can capture market share rapidly, if the price points are right, in very little time causing disruptive ripples in the industry. We feel we will be disrupting the designer-wear industry and change the way customers and designers transact and discover each other. This will become possible by not just using our smart web-based interface that is specifically designed for them to do those things but also we will use our team’s technical and marketing expertise to promote these designers and help them grow and manage their business in the most efficient way possible.
Harsh Shah: 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 straightly 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 helps us in easy scaling and still 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?
Kaizad Hansotia: Even though I do not hold a background in fashion, I have made sure that people in my team are well versed with the fashion industry. My core team and advisory board has three key people who have 10–20 years of experience working in the fashion and retail industry, they not only help us keep updated with the latest trends but also make sure we do not make the same mistakes they did and learn from other people’s experience. Our founding team on the other hand also has some young designer graduates who help us in curation as well as business development. Although this in no way means that success is assured, but I am optimistic that it will eventually increase the odds.
Harsh Shah: 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 period of last 4 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.
How comfortably funded are you? You need to have deep pockets to cut through the clutter, build a brand, and ensure financial viability too.
Kaizad Hansotia: I understand that in order to start or scale a business you need capital and a lot of it. But let me assure you, capital cannot stop innovation. It can obviously bring the pace of progress to a halt but never stops it. So, even though we are a bootstrapped startup which does not have deep pockets; every day we rely on frugal innovation and follow strict financial discipline with an optimistic goal to ultimately build a winning brand. We have also started talking to few investors who have approached us to raise some seed capital to take GetNatty to the next level. But we are very selective in choosing the right investor, we prefer to partner with someone who has been an entrepreneur in their prior stints and do not follow the herd mentality to jump into something just because it’s what everyone else seems to be excited about.
Harsh Shah: 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 to grow despite 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?
Kaizad Hansotia: The selection process of the vendors is done by our curation team. We are very particular about that. We look for original talent who make products that lie in the affordable luxury category. Meaning, both the middle class as well as the upper-middle can buy it due to its aspirational value. So essentially our goal is to offer designer-wear products to the end-user at non-premium price points. We hold no inventory of course, and designers deliver the product based on the orders they receive. Typically it takes between 5–7 days for the product to get delivered which is not that far from the current e-commerce industry standards and customers who buy designer wear are willing to have more patience with their order delivery.
Harsh Shah: 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 optimize 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 on-boarding brands which have a good collection of sling bags.
Where do you see yourself by December 2017?
Kaizad Hansotia: We have set an ambitious goal to acquire 1000 designers and 10000 customers by 2017–18 end become operationally profitable. Also, it is our aim to create at least 100 new jobs every year and inspire several young and fresh designers from India to turn into designerpreneurs.
Harsh Shah: 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 on-board 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 retain more strongly the position of nation’s largest store powered e-commerce portal.
