<b>Wooplr:</b> Making fashion social again

Wooplr is converting couture into a community before monetising the model

Smrithi Rao is an authority on fashion to 9,700-odd people who follow her on Wooplr, an upcoming social network for fashion. She commands this attention through well-curated styles, which she engineers by mixing and matching clothing and accessories from several brands.

What compels women like Smrithi to share their personal tastes in fashion online, for no quantifiable gain? That's the magic of social networks, which reward us with visibility and appreciation from others, especially when it comes to the way we dress.

Wooplr, a fashion-focused social network, keeps its business going by curating some of the best fashion brands its users are wearing. This allows others to quickly buy clothing and accessories that will help them replicate the look created by someone like Smrithi.
 

The journey

Arjun Zacharia, Praveen Rajaretnam, Ankit Sabharwal and Soumen Sarkar, co-founders of Wooplr, first met while working at security software company McAfee. Even before starting Wooplr, three of them got together to build Auto 404, a public transport redressal system.

When that venture failed to take off due to bureaucratic issues, they set their eyes on a shopping fashion online venture, especially for women. With no prior experience in the fashion industry, or e-commerce, they set out to bring the social part in shopping clothes online, something large e-tailers like Myntra and Jabong had missed.

"Women aren't inspired by what they see on the cover of a magazine or what characters in a TV serial are wearing. They're inspired by other women and that's what Wooplr provides. You're looking at women who aren't models, the photos haven't been taken in a studio and then photoshopped," says Praveen Rajaretnam.

Wooplr stayed away from the discount model to bring users on board right from the start, a model widely adopted by the first wave of e-tailers and is now showing its weakness. Instead, it chose the slower growth model of building fundamental hooks of getting users to spend more time on its platform before buying any stuff.

"What they were building was a very difficult task but if it were to succeed, it would be amazing. So, we did take into consideration the risk. They were converting fashion into a community before deriving commerce from the same community, and that was unique," says Rahul Chandra, managing director at Helion Ventures, which has backed Wooplr.

Next step

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, said only if a product had a billion users would it make sense to monetise it. Albeit at a much smaller scale, Wooplr's model also required a set of discerning users before it could take the next step. In January, the company took that step, adding the commerce aspect to its platform.

To create a better experience, Wooplr took control of the buying aspect on its platform, instead of linking users to online and offline vendors for the products listed on its website and apps. This made sense because users today spend three-four minutes per session on Wooplr and log in 12 times on an average a month.

"It's the network effect that has helped us grow. We started off asking people to show us what you're wearing and that was their intent to use our service. Now, when they come on our platform and see posts, the intent to buy can be converted to a sale and we charge a percentage of the transaction value for that," says Zacharia, also the chief executive officer.

Today, Wooplr has two million monthly active users on its platform, seven per cent of whom actively post on it. A slightly larger base interacts and the rest are passive viewers. It aims to grow this number to five million users in 18 months, continuing with its model of no-discounts and will also look to expand its base of sellers from 100 to 250.

The firm has so far raised $5 million in a Series-A funding from Helion Ventures and also roped in InMobi co-founders Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal and Amit Gupta as backers. Since it does not offer discounts on every purchase, Wooplr says it has positive unit economics, meaning the business isn't reliant on funding for sustainability.

Zacharia says that for the time being the company doesn't require a large round of institutional investment but will bring aboard more investors who will be able to mentor and help mould the company.

FACT BOX
Inception: March 2012

Area of business: Social network for fashion

Funding: $5 million in Series-A from Helion Ventures; undisclosed investment from Naveen Tewari

EXPERT TAKE

Fashion, as a category, captures the largest wallet share of the discretionary spend of an average Indian consumer. Online fashion discovery platforms like Wooplr simulate the 'window shopping' experience and hence, have a strong value proposition. One of the key differentiators vis-a-vis larger fashion e-commerce players is the capability to provide complete looks and then enabling a consumer to buy that through a combination of online and offline retailers.

Multiple platforms have mushroomed over the years and the key to success for Wooplr will be to ensure high user engagement through personalised and curated content; high assortment of products; highly intuitive user interfaces; enabling visual search; finding a way out to catalogue offline retailers and not just depend on online fashion portals. They should also develop a robust fashion community with large user-generated content, which should act as an exit barrier for consumers once they get used to the platform. In addition, a quick and hassle-free checkout and  payment mechanism and a quick and predictable logistics system has become a hygiene factor for any e-commerce business today.

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Praveen Sinha, former chief executive officer, Jabong.com