Straight from the manufacturer to your doorstep – Hubballi-based taazataaza.com keeps it ‘fresh’ with no middlemen

Founded by Karthika Reddy, Taazataaza.com is a B2B2C ecommerce marketplace where makers, producers and manufacturers can sell their products directly to wholesalers, retailers and end customers.

Karthika Reddy started taazataaza.com in 2016 from the ground floor of her home in Hubballi, a tier-II city in Karnataka. Two-and-a-half years later, the ground floor remains her office even though her business has grown substantially - almost by 300 percent in the last year alone.

The young entrepreneur says the arrangement comes out of a sense of practicality. She is a mother to two children - the younger one is just two-and-a-half-years old, and this helps her to manage both home and business without worrying over a commute or long hours at work.

“I can check in on my children and also pay attention to my business. I guess I am going to work out of my home for a while,” she says, as she introduces us to taazataaza.com.

Magic in the marketplace

After completing her engineering in Electronics & Telecommunications, Karthika chose to dabble in a few things on her own instead of opting for a full-time career. She worked on web development, 3D technology software, and search engine development before plunging into a full-time marketplace with taazataaza.com.

While there are a large number of online marketplaces, what makes taazataaza.com different is that the manufacturer sells on it directly without any middlemen in the picture.

Karthika explains, “It is a B2B2C ecommerce marketplace, where makers, producers and manufacturers, including large-scale manufacturers, as well as small makers can sell their products directly to wholesalers, retailers and end customers. We see taazataaza.com as more than another marketplace, and we offer both producers and consumers technologies to actively engage for better fulfilment. We are building it as a prosumer marketplace. All our processes are flexible, transparent, and constantly evolving to enable our vendors to enhance their product portfolio, and is also leading to informed purchases by customers.”

If you browse through the website, you can see everything - from traditional Ilkal sarees, candies, indoor plants, books, jewellery, puja items and more. 

“The primary pain point we are addressing here is the smaller manufacturers will have their own identity instead of being lost in the ocean of resellers. The second is that we lead our customers towards informed buying decisions by providing vital information about the product,” she adds.

Building the business

Taazataaza.com’s customer base includes both national and international customers. While offering services to customers throughout India, it also ships select products to international customers in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Germany.

Karthika believes in the advantage of starting up in a small town. “Small towns definitely come with certain advantages. One of the primary advantage, especially for startups, is the operational cost, bigger spaces and the overall burn rate will be less.”

Operating a business is still easier than facing a barrage of questions from “well-meaning” people, feels Karthika.

She says, all I have been hearing for the past three years is, “Karthika, are you seriously running the company all by yourself from your home with two kids?, or ‘Are you out of your mind to do something crazy like this?”

Despite the naysayers, Karthika soldiers on. “Currently, we are a small team of four, and so all of us wear multiple hats. We handle development, server security, sales, support, packaging, photography and all other related issues covering 360 degrees of taazataaza.com,” she says.

Their revenue model is simple - they charge a certain amount of marketing fees from vendors. Additionally, they also offer photography and cataloguing services at no additional cost.

The company was started with an initial investment of Rs 30 lakh and remains bootstrapped so far. “We are looking to raise funds in the long time, but are right now focussing on building our vendor and customer base and all-round business development,” says Karthika.

Growth has been steady with the business seeing a 200-300 percent increase in terms of sales, vendors and the customer base. All this despite absolutely no spending on digital marketing or any aggressive push by the founder.

On taazataaza.com’s future plans, Karthika says, “We are constantly striving to improvise on both sides - business and technology. Our aim is to reach out to a larger vendor base and at the same time maintain diversity, as well as continuing the organic growth of sales. The next step in technology is to leverage the accumulated wealth to improve the user experience and the business metrics. We do have a few hurdles in terms of resources, both human and capital. All this, however, can be worked out till we reach a certain stage where expansion becomes imperative. Maybe sometimes, slow is fast.”

While there are some who feel that where you start up has a bearing on your success, Karthika believes, ‘it is, it was, and it will never be about the town’. “What matters the most is the dream, the number of sleepless nights you spend, till you make it real.”