Unamia: Clothing ‘created’ by Parents for Children!

Tuesday September 11, 2012 , 3 min Read

It is a long standing paradox that even though the ecommerce space has exploded in India, there are no large players in the kidswear segment. Also, even on the offline front, the largest offline kidswear brand caters to no more than 2% of the overall market. This is a unique characteristic of the kidswear space. You can thus understand the motivation for a smart entrepreneur to enter into such a lucrative gap. Jyotsna Pattabiraman is one such entrepreneur who realized the existence of this gap and launched Unamia to fill it. This primary knowledge of the market scenario was followed by an extensive market research in several cities. The studies showed that customer dissatisfaction was high with existing kidswear options, and gave several insights on an evolved parental mindset, the close identification with kidswear and the lengths to which parents went to find the right kidswear. The deduction was that kidswear is slowly becoming a status symbol and the market potential is huge.

Unamia is actually "Una mia", which means "one of mine" in Italian. They chose this name to convey the strong bond between parent and child. Unamia involves parents at every step, whether is it conceptualizing a new line, designing it or pricing it. Unamia clothing is quite literally created by parents for their children. To suit the tastes of the evolved parents, Unamia clothing is internationally styled with a distinctive cosmopolitan flair. An Italian name associated with it, gives the required leverage.

“I've always been attracted to companies that shake things up. I've spent most of my professional life on the frontlines of the internet, at pioneers like eBay and Yahoo during their formative years as well as at smaller companies that were acquired or went public. While I've always been entrepreneurial, it took me quite a while to become an actual entrepreneur. Finding that I could not imagine life in a large company was as big a motivator as the "aha!" moment when I realized that I could make a tangible difference to a very large problem that had been a persistent thorn in my flesh,” says Jyotsna.

Unamia has been founded by, in Co-founder Jyotsna “Jo” Pattabiraman’s words, “awesome entrepreneurs” Debasis “Debu” Chakraborty and Mihir Mohan. Debasis is from NIFT and has played key roles in retail from the beginning of his career. As a result, he has the critical ability to manage the supply chain and keep an eye out for trends. Mihir is an IIT grad with a never-say-die attitude who has built mission-critical systems for businesses and the government. The rest of the team includes individuals “who are ready to grab any tiger by its tail”.

“As the mother of an eight-year old, I gave my husband long shopping lists every time he went abroad, full of kidswear basics ranging from underwear to shorts to pajamas. And when one day I realized that some of my son's favorite clothes were marked "Made in India", it hit me that we can make great apparel in India but we can't get it in stores - a distortion that needed to be fixed,” says Jyotsna.Jyotsna feels that consumer rights in India are very poor. As a result, customer confidence in new shopping experiences is very low. She aspires to make concerted efforts to build customer confidence as an industry. “Once we're able to do that, expensive artifacts like COD will gradually wither away,” adds Jyotsna.

Check out Unamia's offerings! This kidswear e-store is now on YourStory Pages. Have you listed your startup?

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