Fashionara to raise up to $15 million to fund expansion

Plans to use funds to build logistics and optimise its technology for mobile devices

Fashionara, a Bangalore-based ‘e-fashion’ start-up co-founded by Arun Sirdeshmukh, former chief executive officer and director of Reliance Trends Limited, is looking at raising a Series-B funding of between $10 million and $15 million to build out logistics and optimise its technology for mobile devices.

The online high-fashion lifestyle store, which started operations just about a year and three months back, had raised a Series-A funding from two venture capital firms – Helion Venture Partners and California-based Lightspeed Venture Partners.

“The existing investors are firmly behind us to participate in the Series-B funding, which might also involve another external VC investor. We expect to close the fund-raising exercise in the next couple of months,” Sirdeshmukh, chief executive of Fashionara, told Business Standard.

Fashionara is currently marketing only online. There could be a lot of merit for Fashionara to connect with the consumer in a stronger way and that calls for further investments, Sirdeshmukh said.

He added that the company was planning to invest in optimising its e-commerce delivery technology for the Android platform to start with, followed by other mobile devices like iPad.

The company has a 25,000-sft central warehousing facility in Bangalore from where it ships out the products to key cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune through various air and on-the-ground logistic tie-ups.

“Next to Bangalore where we might set up a warehousing facility is probably the National Capital Region (NCR), followed by Hyderabad, sometime next year,” he said.

The sum total for establishing a warehousing unit, including the inventory count, would be between Rs 2 crore and Rs 5 crore, said Sirdeshmukh, who sold his apparel brand-marketing business Indus-League Clothing Limited to the Future Group in 2005, which is now a Rs 500-crore business.

Stating that Fashionara had been receiving between 800 to 1,000 orders per day since last month (with the per order value being Rs 1,600-Rs 1,800), Sirdeshmukh said the company was expecting the order value to go upwards of Rs 2,000 once it added high-value accessories like sunglasses, watches and perfumes to its catalog. It also plans to take its total assortment from the current 300 brands to 500 by the first half of 2014.

 
According to him, the share of online in the overall retail trade for fashion products is anywhere between 15% and 20%, considering the advent of ecommerce industry in the US is about 10 years.

“In the US, one out of every eight garments are sold online. In India, the ecommerce industry is just about two years old. However, there are 30-40 million who are shopping or trading online in India, of which the larger category is fashion,” he said, adding that the company was targeting to reach the break-even point in 12-18 months from now.