Style discovery across online stores becomes easy with Dilbole
While excel sheet enables us to keep track of daily business and routines etc., there is no such tool to bookmark changing fashion and trends. Currently, people use Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest to a certain extent to showcase what they buy or own. But none of these networks are built around showcasing style and products.
Discovering cool products, brands and stores is getting increasingly tough in this vast forest of products on the internet. Many small and good stores cannot compete with the big guys in the discovery game. To get rid of this pain, here comes Dilbole. It’s a product bookmarking tool available on mobile and web to showcase and discover style.
Primarily, Dilbole is Pinterest for products. Earlier, Dilbole was known as Scrapehere but it has recently been rebranded with a new name and strong focus on mobile.
People can create their own private or public collections and add products they love from any e-commerce store like Flipkart, Jabong, Myntra and 10,000 plus others. So, while window shopping online, people can make their own product list, share and discuss via Dilbole’s web and mobile app.
Dilbole is the brainchild of Khaleel Pasha and Hema Kiran Dilbole, born out of Khaleel’s personal frustration while window shopping online. “Online shopping is a lot of convenience, but it misses the social juice of the traditional shopping. We want to make online shopping more social,” he adds.
With Dilbole, users can discover latest fashion/style and products collected by fellow window shoppers across 1,500 online stores.
Besides being a personal pain point, Khaleel saw a mammoth opportunity in improving the marketing funnel for brands. “Being in the online retail domain for about a decade, I clearly know that the current marketing funnel is very inefficient. Brands just force their ideas on people, the feedback loop is weak. I want to reverse this process with technology,” says Khaleel.
Khaleel has a masters degree in computers science from NIT Warangal. He worked for around a decade in the online retail industry with e-commerce biggies like Amazon, Target, Mothercare and Marks and Spencer. Kiran is a BITS Pilani alumnus and earlier worked in Broadcom for a couple of years before joining Khaleel in building Dilbole.
The venture is being mentored by Jai Natarajan, CEO Xentrix studios.
The company has amassed 17000 plus registered users and over 200K products have been added by users on the platform so far. In terms of style creation, more than 6,500 collections have been created by the users.
Currently, the company is focusing on building traction and will focus on monetizing later on. Dilbole also plans to raise funding and is in talks with a few angels and venture capitalists.
Fashion in e-commerce has come a long way and contributes a major chunk of overall transactions generated by horizontal e-commerce majors. From a consumer perspective, selection is not a challenge, but discovery of new style and fashion products are time consuming and tiring.
The fashion/style discovery space has been dominated by Limeroad and Wooplr. They also drew VCs interest and raised funding from marquee investors. Limeroad raised $15 million series B round, one of the biggest Series B for any online commerce company since 2011 while Wooplr secured Series A funding round of $5 million led by Helion Ventures this year.
The next wave of growth in fashion e-ommerce will come from social and discovery verticals. Dilbole seems to be an interesting play in style discovery space and it would be exciting to see how it evolves in times to come.