A “Fashionable” startup to discover shopping

Roposo.com is a new fashionable kid on the block. It is basically a recommendation engine that throws up the most relevant women’s fashion products to a user from more than 5000 brands and 150 e-commerce portals. And Binny Bansal is one of the investors, along with India Quotient and Startup Superfuel.

“Roposo is the Google or Facebook of fashion,” says Avinash Saxena, co-founder of Roposo and ex-CTO of Zomato, clarifying that Roposo is not an e-commerce or price-comparison website.

“Our only focus is discovery, not fulfillment or discounting. Discovery in itself is a huge problem to solve. Online shopping has become so crowded and fragmented, that finding what you wants can be a very frustrating experience,” he says. “Let’s say you have a basic need like an elegant leather bag to take to office. When to go on the internet, you have to sift through dozens of different e-commerce stores, opening multiple tabs tabs and manually work through all kinds of descriptive filters. It’s completely non-intuitive. Women are not thinking filters when they go shopping.”

Sounds fair. So I went to Roposo, and typed in “Elegant leather bags for office” and below is what I found (http://www.roposo.com/search?q=elegant%20leather%20bags%20for%20office)

article for Avinash Saxena_blog.docx - Google Docs

It got a neatly arranged collection of 351 bags from different stores like Done-by-None, Koovs, Limeroad, ASOS (an international website) of good-looking, sober bags probably the right kind for office.  Not bad. What’s more, I was attracted immediately to the bag with 22 likes, curated by a user called Divya.

The website itself looks and feels different – when you land on the homepage (www.roposo.com/feed) you are shown lists of fashion items that have been curated by other users. And users make lists every few minutes.

roposo

Sort of like a social network, Roposo has users liking, saving, sharing and “playing” with products. Something that women love doing as a past-time, I am told by Avinash. That’s easy to understand, because we all know that women spend a huge amount of time window-shopping, and they like to doing it with other people, not alone, like on facebook. After 7 months of beta testing, Avinash found that 2,030,000 products were being viewed daily and 3,00,0000 products were being saved monthly by women on Roposo.

Neat. So what’s the business model? “The more crowded and mature e-commerce gets, the more valuable Roposo becomes as a marketing or acquisition channel. Soon, we are going to become the best, most targeted place for any vendor to acquire customers or create brand awareness. Already, the leads we generate have a conversion rate that is 5X that of Google.”

Sounds cool. So ladies and gentlemen, check out out Roposo for yourselves.

About Roposo.com:

Roposo.com is a fashion focused social-network that allows women to discover and shop new products and trends are liked, curated, personalized and updated every day from across online brands and e-commerce portals.  Roposo.com is the brainchild of 3 IIT Delhi alumni, Mayank Bhangadia, Avinash Saxena (ex CTO of Zomato.com) and Kaushal Shubhank.

Roposo.com is a brand of Relevant E-solutions and is headquartered in Gurgaon. For more information, visit http://www.roposo.com.

About Investors:

 

  • India Quotient –

Started in June 2012 by Anand Lunia, India Quotient began with a motive of funding pre-revenue early stage companies. Having 5 companies in their portfolio currently and with aggressive plans to follow, India Quotient has announced the close of its first fund raise amounting to INR 25 crores. They invest in very early stage startups – companies that are still discovering a revenue model, pricing, product or strategy.

 

  • 5 ideas Start up Fuel –

Startup Superfuel is  a seed stage fund that provides early stage tech start-ups a blend of human, financial and social capital managed Pearl Uppal (ex-CEO of Fashion and You) and Gaurav Kachru (ex-CEO of Deals and You).

 

  • Binny Bansal, Co – Founder Flipkart.com – Angel investment.

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