GoCoop: Fostering a cooperative culture

Bengaluru-based social marketplace GoCoop helps cooperatives and community-based enterprises to list and sell their products online

Sattaiah, an ikat sari weaver from Koyalagudem village in Nalgonda district of Telangana, used to find it difficult to make his ends meet, as middlemen used to take away a huge chunk of his earnings. After enrolling himself in GoCoop, a Bengaluru-based online social marketplace, the master weaver could bypass them and get a better price.

Sattaiah is one of the 60,000 weavers and artisans who are benefiting from GoCoop, a platform that brings weaver cooperatives and artisans together online, and creates market linkages.

"Lack of direct access to customers and delay in payments from intermediaries have aggravated the problems of artisans. After our partnership with GoCoop, our 600 members are now realising around 12 per cent more margins," says Srimannarayana, president of the Koyalagudem Handloom Weavers Cooperative Society.

From his childhood experience in villages and his corporate career spanning over 10 years, including as a director of the innovation centre with Accenture in India, Siva Devireddy, founder and managing director of GoCoop, has developed a strong passion for driving social change through technology innovation. "My vision was to enable sustainable livelihood for rural producers through technology. The key challenges the producers faced was in access to markets and also market-related information. The other issue was managing the supply chain which was quite complex, considering that most of these producers are small and in rural parts ," he says.

After working extensively for four years with cooperatives and other grassroot organisations in understanding their challenges and developing strategies to address these, Devireddy conceptualised the idea of building a community-based online marketplace for weavers and artisans, where they could list and sell their products, in 2011. GoCoop started full-time operations in 2012.

It caters to retail and wholesale purchase of authentic Indian handloom and handicraft products for domestic and international customers. It also provides a transparent and traceable business-to-business sourcing service for wholesale or bulk purchases. This includes sourcing, merchandising, sampling, negotiating trade terms, order confirmation, production support, logistics, trade compliance and payments.

According to Devireddy, what makes GoCoop stand out is that it also provides the required support and hand-holding for weavers and artisans in doing business online. "Besides, we directly work with the Development Commissioner of Handlooms and the Union ministry of textiles on various handloom-related projects," he adds.

GoCoop charges a marketing fee, included in the price of the products. The firm works with state government-supported cooperatives and craft organisations in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Odisha, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, West Bengal and Assam, providing its platform for e-commerce services. It has 4,300 registered cooperatives, with 60,000 weavers and artisans selling 15,000 products. "We have about 8,000 buyers registered on our platform, including B2B buyers like boutiques, designers, home entrepreneurs and non-resident Indian customers. Our aim is to have 100,000 customers, including 1,000 B2B buyers, on board over the next three years," says Devireddy, adding that GoCoop aims to empower a million weavers within five years.

Unitus Seed Fund and the Indian Angel Network (IAN), which had invested an undisclosed amount in GoCoop in December 2013, believe it has the potential to become India's Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, for the handloom and handicraft sector.

Will Poole, co-founder and managing partner of Unitus, says: "Their B2B-optimised e-commerce platform is improving supply chain efficiencies, enabling market linkages, protecting producer margins and ensuring scalability. India is already the world's largest supplier of handmade products. We think GoCoop has the potential to capture a large portion of this market through its platform."

GoCoop is gearing up to launch a mobile app by the first quarter of the next financial year. It is also working on a next round of fund-raising, which it should be able to close before the end of this financial year. Declining to specify GoCoop's current revenue, Devireddy, says: "Since August 2014, we have focused on our marketing and sales efforts and our gross merchandise value and revenues are growing quite well. We are expecting 200 per cent growth this year."

Poole says GoCoop still has a lot more work to do as a social marketplace. "There are 500,000 cooperatives in India alone and GoCoop has so far touched only 4,436. Indian craft is estimated to be a Rs 24,000 crore market, and GoCoop can grow to a Rs 1,000-crore company easily in the next five years and support over a million artisans. Once we have achieved the required depth in the Indian handloom and handicraft sectors, we aspire to expand to other countries as well."

FACT BOX

Inception: 2012
Founder: Siva Devireddy
Area of business: Online social marketplace for Indian crafts
Market size: Rs 24,000 crore
Revenue outlook: Rs 1,000 crore in 5 years
Fund-raising: Raised undisclosed sum from Unitus and IAN; To raise next round by this financial year-end

EXPERT TAKE

GoCoop is an interesting concept, aiming to help artisans connect with a wide network of buyers. There is immense interest for handloom products in urban society, as well as among people of Indian origin living abroad. There are some sites running on a similar concept, such as Oyeart.com, Craftsvilla.com and Indigohandloom.com. However, while all these sites are largely focused on retailing of products, GoCoop's focus is on creating a bridge between craftsmen, cooperative societies and the buyers.

A major challenge could be ensuring collaboration with the right set of cooperatives. Convincing anybody for a tie-up with an idea of more sales is easy. The challenge comes when expectations go sky-high from day one. Another challenge is keeping these cooperatives away from middlemen. Many a time, these middlemen provide capital support to handloom workers which becomes a trap. Hence, sustained mentoring and setting the right expectation at the beginning would help.

If GoCoop works towards sustained mentoring of handloom workers, artisans, cooperative members and NGO partners, it will help it ensure a steady line for product sourcing. Also, facilitating better machinery and skill enhancement programmes, in association with government agencies, will enable a sustained quality supply network. Another step GoCoop can take is to promote use of handloom products. This will help create a conducive ecosystem for their business.

(Puja Bansal is the founder and director of MyHeera.com, a Delhi-based online B2B portal for the jewellery industry)