With Mumbai-based startup Mylace.in, shopping for lingerie online has never been easier
Tuesday November 22, 2011 , 5 min Read
“If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?” This is exactly the question Mylace chooses to answer. The founders believe, for many women, a visit to the local lingerie shop could be a nightmare. Sales people are either to loud, disinterested or ignorant to address the customer’s needs and the product you want is never available. In conversation with Abhilasha Dafria for YourStory.in, entrepreneur Karan Behal tells us how his e-venture Mylace offers the facility of seamlessly browsing an exhaustive collection of high quality lingerie from the comfort of your own home. Mylace aims to provide a plethora of styles and sizes and delivers them to your doorstep. It is the ultimate online destination for buying women’s lingerie, sleepwear, loungewear, swimwear, shapewear and other lingerie accessories. The startup currently offers 15 brands and over 600 products. Shopping for lingerie has never been easier.How did you come up with the business idea?
We also founded successful sleepwear brand Pretty Secrets and multi-brand lingerie stores Lace – the lingerie club, which currently operates five stores in Mumbai and Pune. Given the accumulated lingerie retail experience of six years, the foray into e-commerce was inevitable.
Knowing that lingerie-buying deals with personal space and involves an element of wariness, how do you think an online portal for the same outdoes the traditional way of buying at stores?
Whilst ideally lingerie shopping should be a pleasurable, comfortable and private experience, traditional retail of lingerie is confined to mom and pop stores offering little by way of product, service or ambiance. Shopping for lingerie has become a necessary chore. This is where Mylace offers a tremendous value proposition. Being the largest collection of multi-brand lingerie (online & offline), the website offers all your favourite products in one place where they can be viewed compared and purchased with ease, all from the privacy of your desktop. With facilities like post paid cash on delivery and no hassle exchange or return policy, shopping for intimates has never been easier.
How much time did it take to build the platform?
Both the front end site and the back end operations took six months to build.
And, what is your current team size?
The current team comprises of 10 members, though we are in the process of an ambitious scale up taking the team to 35-40 members within a year.
Do you have a healthy refund policy?
We follow a no questions asked easy return policy. Products can be returned for a refund or exchange hassle free.
It has been two months since you went live. What is the demography of your buyers? We track over 20 metrics on a daily basis including demographics. Currently over 30 per cent of our customers reside outside metro cities. 36 per cent of our users are men and more than 15 per cent of the transactions are coming from loyal customers. Given the relative infancy of our website, these numbers are very encouraging.
What is the kind of traction on the site right now?
These are early days and we are getting 3500 to 4000 visitors a day. However, our conversions and transactions size is higher than average. Also, 92 per cent of our customers have purchased something from the site on their first visit.
How does your typical buyer land up on the site? What are your marketing plans?
Currently, over 70 per cent of the traffic on the site is paid for by CPC marketing. Our marketing plans are very exciting in the coming months where we will be looking for a canvassing of all online marketing spaces to create awareness for our website and value proposition.
What is the size of the market that you are looking at capturing?
The lingerie e-commerce market will be at worth Rs 145 crore within three years. We aim to capture at least 30-35 per cent of this market.
How does the supply chain work?
We manage the entire inventory ourselves and maintain significant stock given the early exponential growth stage we are in. We have contractual agreements with AFL Fedex and DTDC to manage our shipments.
Could you tell us a little more about your tie-ups? Which brands do you have on board?
Mylace is currently associated with Pretty Secrets, Lace, Triumph, Amante, Lovable, Jockey, Enamor, Bwitch, Maya, About u, Secret Curves, Peches and Marilyn. We are in the process of adding more brands including a few international ones not available in the market at present.
Do you see other market players as competition? What are your differentiators?
Our key differentiator is that, unlike other lingerie e-commerce entrants, we are lingerie retailers turned e-commerce entrepreneurs and not the other way around. We understand the specialisation that lingerie as a segment requires and are using our accumulated experience of six years retailing and 30 years manufacturing to capitalise on this space. We also carry very strong in house brands Pretty Secrets and Lace, which currently contribute over 50 per cent of our sales and subsequently give us a significant edge in operating margins. Also, our associations in the industry are strong and well-established.
Where do you see yourself in the next five years?
We are looking at an ambitious expansion plan within the next 4-6 months where we are looking to move to a new warehouse facility and make sizeable investments in our back-end and marketing. We will not stop at anything short of establishing ourselves as market leaders, capitalising on the position and then expanding the market and our share within it.
Go to Mylace.in for further details!
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