Binny Bansal and others invest $1 million in the fashion focused social network Roposo.com
Gurgaon-based Roposo.com, India's first fashion focused social network, has raised bridge funding through their existing investors, India Quotient, 5 ideas Start up Fuel and Binny Bansal. The size of the total investment is close to USD 1 million.
The fashion focused social-network allows women to discover and shop new products and trends are liked, curated, personalized and updated every day from across online brands and e-commerce portals. Roposo.com is the brainchild of three IIT Delhi alumni, Mayank Bhangadia, Avinash Saxena (ex CTO of Zomato.com) and Kaushal Shubhank.
Started as a gifting site, Giveter, the three co-founder later on pivoted to Roposo. Though both the startups are functioning as of now, but Roposo has has been gaining traction rapidly. Roposo.com has over 2 lakh products across 5000 brands from more than 150 vendors. All of these products are curated and recommended to each user as per her individual taste. The strength of Roposo.com's recommendation engine reflects in the 5-8% effective conversion rate of traffic over 3 months.
Co-founder of Flipkart.com, Binny Bansal who is an angel investor in roposo.com said,
These are a bunch of hungry innovators from my alma mater, IIT Delhi. Not only do they have a great idea, they have the skills to make it happen. A networking destination built around fashion where women can hang out and exchange thoughts & ideas, leading them to buying fashion-products is a ground-breaking business idea.
Co- founder Mayank Bhangadia said,
Everyone has witnessed how e-commerce has revolutionized the availability of products for shopping. But it has created another problem or need – how to discover these products in such a cluttered online space. Today the kinds of tools available are simply not designed keeping in mind how the user goes about shopping. Roposo.com is solving this problem through data.
Roposo.com has crossed 100,000 unique monthly visitors and already has significant social activity - such as users creating lists, following other users, liking products, commenting, sharing on Facebook etc. The most common activity is adding products to lists. In the month of May, more than 300,000 SKUs (non-unique) were saved in lists by active users.
Roposo.com has a number of unique features that make discovering fashion highly intuitive. The Roposo Color Palette assists users in picking trends by looking at the colour and visually responding to them (rather than searching for the word ‘purple’). Users can explore fashion by mood (‘flirty’) or by taste (‘simple’) or even by trend (‘sheer’). Even without having to spell what she wants, a user can discover fashion by browsing through curated collections (called ‘lists’) made by other users. In order to make discount-hunting simple and intuitive for users, they have just launched a "Personalized Discount" feature. In this feature, a user saves what she likes from across brands and stores such as Myntra, Jabong, Koovs etc in a list, and Roposo.com notifies her when a personalized discount becomes available on the products she saved.