The startup Violetstreet lets users put together stylish ‘looks’ for each other
Promising: Nayan Kumar and Ankur Gupta of Violetstreet
Hyderabad: The year has started on a promising note for startups in Hyderabad. Violetstreet, a fashion social network, raised Rs 2 crore in funding recently quite a deal for a startup that’s just a year-old. Also, actress Neha Dhupia and fashion designers Manish Malhotra, Masaba Gupta, Anita Dongre, Nishka Lulla, Payal Singhal, have been tweeting about the startup that has been founded by engineers Nayan Kumar and Ankur Gupta.
Here’s why: Besides collecting the best of clothes and other lifestyles items from the Web, Violetstreet lets users put together stylish looks for each other. More than 20,000 looks have been created on its wall so far. Then you get to shop real-time with friends.
Nayan says, “Don’t we take our friends to shopping malls to tell us what looks good on us and what does not? Or, if we are shopping online, we keep sending links of the clothes in chat boxes. With Violetstreet, we are taking this offline experience of shopping online and letting friends, and fashion-savvy users, connect.”
CLOTHES AND CODES?
Nayan, 24, had always had this idea, because he’s “quite a picky shopper”. And, he found support in Ankur, whom he met at a startup event in 2013. While Nayan has a degree in chemical engineering from BITS-Pilani Hyderabad, Ankur is a computer science graduate from NIT, Allahabad, who was previously working with city’s Microsoft R &D.
“We do get those looks ‘What are engineers doing with fashion?,” says Ankur, adding, “But we have a NIFT graduate Divya Sisodia who is looking after the fashion segment... Naturally, our style quotient has gone up (laughs). A month ago, we started a section for men. It’s picking up, though 80 per cent of our users are girls.”
COMPETITION?
In past one year, with crazy sales on Flipkart, Myntra, Jabong and Snapdeal, e-tailing has seen a meteoric rise. What about the competition? Nayan says, “We are not an e-commerce site, we are a social e-commerce platform.
That’s one thing. And, it’s a huge Rs 2,000 crore-market in India. But we do have competitors in this segment, like Benagluru’s FashUpp and Delhi’s Roposo. Internationally, there are Wanelo and Polyvore. So, this year, our focus is to shift from website to mobiles, that’s what youngsters prefer.”
( Source : dc )
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