When Mukesh Bansal came back to India three years ago, he was bursting with business ideas he could start with. Eventually, it was the lack of a one-stop shop in the personalisation space that caught his fancy, and money. This is how www.myntra.com came into being.
Bansal observed that the domestic online marketplace was abuzz with portals that were specifically personalising categories like T-shirts or mugs. “From T-shirts to mugs, watches, posters, notepads, stuffed dolls or even a mouse pad, Myntra’s gifting ideas clicked because of the personal touch we offered the user,” he says. Today, the site boasts of thousands of customers who have shopped on the site.
An IIT-IIM alumnus, Bansal started Myntra with Rs 30 lakh in his bank account. According to him, he could dare to venture on his own only because he had an experience of 10 years in the Silicon Valley and had seen the worst of the dotcom business. The initial response from consumers heightened Bansal’s hope and he decided to rope in some external funding for his business. The big break for Myntra, says the CEO, came late last year when the company raised over $5 million from three venture capitalists. That deal established the company’s credibility and, most importantly, as Bansal says, it was a major victory in silencing his cynics. “People had warned me that Myntra would end up being just another run-of-the-mill idea and would not work.” With the external cash infusion, Bansal revamped his back-end operations and grew his team to 70 people.
Continuing to prove its doubters wrong, the company tied up Indian Premier League teams — namely Chennai Super Kings, Rajasthan Royals, Kolkata Knight Riders and Kings XI Punjab — for personalised team jerseys. Like other players in the market, Bansal too gets half of his business from corporates and institutions. But a retail push is on the cards too. Bangalore-based Myntra now retails in a few malls in Bangalore and New Delhi and is hopeful of retailing in another ten cities, including Pune and Hyderabad, within two years. “We feel that the number of individual buyers will go up in the near future and we plan to utilise this growth,” Bansal shares.
With a turnover of Rs 4.5 crore, Bansal has complete faith in Myntra’s ability to grow its consumer base. For now, the ambitious entrepreneur concludes by saying: “Myntra is on the top of the mind when it comes to personalisation and we have to ensure that we maintain our own standards.”
