Content plays a big role while selling designers’ fashion, Indianroots plans for a few acquisition: Rahul Narvekar, CEO Indianroots

Last month, media conglomerate NDTV’s retail venture Indianroots targeted primarily at Indian diaspora had gone live with its beta version. Within 20 days of launch, Indianroots claims to have sold fashion accessories and handicraft worth Rs 16 lakh. At present, most of its orders originate from the US, India, the UK and Germany. Importantly, the portal doesn’t offer cash-on-delivery (COD) as payment option. To understand more about company’s growth and plan, YourStory spoke to Rahul Narvekar, CEO, Indianroots.Edited excerpts:

How has been the traction so far in terms of traffic and orders per day?

While we are in a beta mode we have built up quite some traction thanks to our blog which was up 2 months prior to the commercial platform switch. We had about 4.25 lakh visitors to the blog without any significant marketing .This was primarily through our content quality as also some alliances with bloggers that we had .

Since going live we have had about Rs 16 lakh of revenue in past 20 days . What is encouraging is that we have had transactions from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, Dubai, Fiji islands, Sweden and India . We have done quite a few transactions with order value of $750 to 1,100 British pounds . My own experience has been that, for new commerce platforms, people typically do lower order values, and as trust builds trade up; but, in our case, because of the NDTV brand leverage, we have had higher transactions happening from day one .

What motivated NDTV to have retail venture catering mostly to foreign countries or NRIs?

The domestic market is currently in a last-man-standing-mode, with all biggies burning enormous amounts of cash and I felt this is not the time to enter with another me-too product . The kind of recall and credibility that the NDTV brand has across the world was our key attraction; also the fact that there is a huge unserved market potential for Indian sensibility products, in an organized manner.

Give some sense about average ticketsize per transaction and margins?

Average ticket size for international is about $445 and Indian is about INR 9,000 - all prepaid (No COD) . Average margins are about 50%.

Future plans.

Focus on the international market and increase the penetration, leveraging all the NDTV platforms. Do strategic alliances and a few acquisitions .