India’s first O2O shopping platform Fashalot raises pre-Series A funding
Fashalot, an O2O (online-to-offline) location-based fashion and store discovery mobile platform, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in pre-Series A round led by YourNest Angel Fund and angel investor Rajul Garg. The funds will be deployed in product development, talent acquisition, and fast-tracking their business growth.
Launched in April 2015 by Amit Koshal, Rishi Batra, and Amit Sharma, Fashalot connects shoppers to brick and mortar retail stores in their neighbourhood. The platform enables consumers to discover clothing of their choice, available at stores, at their nearest location. The ultimate aim for the platform is to increase foot traffic and engagement at stores.
The startup is operational in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru, and aims to aggressively scale up its operations to newer cities by the end of this year. In September 2015, the platform was reported to have close to 0.6 million views and more than 55,000 products listed, seeing an average of over 250 shoppers every day.
Speaking about the growth, Amit, Founder and CEO of Fashalot, says
Fashalot has demonstrated a growth rate of over 100 percent month-on-month. Several regional, national, and international brands that have partnered with us owing almost 10 percent of their monthly revenue to our mobile technology. Being on track, the capital raised will contribute significantly for us to achieve this goal.
According to Rishi, Co-founder and CFO of Fashalot, the platform has driven more than 15,000 people to their partner stores in March 2016. And their repeat rates are over 30 percent as of now. Fashalot has also recorded over 60,000 downloads for their app across platforms.
Commenting on the investment Girish Shivani, nominee Director from YourNest, says, “We found that Fashalot’s founding team has cross-functional skillsets. Their week-on-week growth across key metrics like customer engagement, traction and retention, as well as transactional value made us invest in them. Further, the opportunity has tremendous potential and is already making a positive impact to fast growing retail sector in the country.”
To boost transactions of the platform, Fashalot offers monetary benefits to their customers for every transaction. With time, according to the co-founders, shoppers can earn up to 25 percent of their bill amount back and can redeem it for future purchases.
Other players
O2O is quite a buzz word in the industry currently. Earlier this month, Facebook launched Facebook services, while venturing into the hyperlocal segment of India. A better example would be Paytm which in December 2015, acquired local service market place Near.in, the first of several O2O acquisitions it plans to make. Hence, O2O is not a new segment, but rather defines the working of hyperlocal startups.
However, its usage in e-commerce is a fairly new strategy, to take over the 98 percent offline retail market, comprising of over 12 million brick-and-mortar stores in the country. Another startup making this a reality is Fynd, which works on the same model of location-based fashion discovery. Notching it up, Fynd also claims to deliver requested products at a customer’s doorstep the same day as the purchase is made.
Moreover, the latter has over 100,000 downloads and has raised (as ShopSense) an undisclosed amount of pre-series A funding from investors Kae Capital, Kunal Bahl, and Rohit Bansal.
Website: www.fashalot.com
