Big Stylist is Looking to Expand into NCR and Hyderabad
Founded in May 2015 by Richa Singh, Chinmaya Sharma and Anurag Srivastava, BigStylist.com is an 'Internet salon' offering beauty and salon services at home. The platform offers services from handpicked and trained beauticians to a consumer in the comfort of her own home, on her preferred schedule.
BigStylist aims to be the first choice for consumers to get services from the best beauty stylists and beauty professionals around them, no matter where they live. The startup currently offers its services across Mumbai, Navi Mumbai and Pune. One of the biggest concerns for customers is the consistency in quality of service across all areas of operations and at all times. BigStylist has addressed this concern by carefully handpicking the stylists and verifying their credentials, which allows the company to keep a tight control on the quality of service provided.
Customers can avail beauty services on BigStylist.com through their website or their mobile app. BigStylist even lets customers place an order through WhatsApp. For BigStylist, the key differentiator is its ability to standardise the consumer’s experience from instance to instance.
Speaking about their competitors, BigStylist’s founders said, “While there are many players offering beauty services at home; many of them are not specialists in this domain. Our competitors in the broad sense would be Urban Clap, Amazon Beauty Services and Housejoy. In fact, BigStylist.com's biggest strength is our specialization and vertical domain focus. Because we do not offer any other service, we are able to focus exclusively on creating and delivering the best quality salon experience at home for our customers.”
Currently, the company caters to both men and women in Mumbai and Pune. It has raised around $2 million from Info Edge in two separate rounds (November, 2015 and September, 2016), which they are using to further expand their reach in Pune and Mumbai. ”We are already operationally profitable in every hyperlocality we operate in and we aim to turn net profitable in these two cities soon. Post that, we are looking to expand into NCR and Hyderabad,” the team added.
BigStylist is at an annual revenue run-rate of Rs.5-6 Cr. The company has served close to 50,000 orders in the last year.
The market size for beauty and wellness services in India is around $8B growing at over 15% year-on-year. “We definitely see the Top15 cities as being prime plays for us. For such a huge industry, it is extremely fragmented. The combined market share of the top 3 leaders of the industry will actually be less than 1%. The key reason behind such slow growth of existing players is the physical space and capital expenditure contingent nature of their business model. The opportunity for us is to create a Rs.500 Cr. topline, profitable business in 4-5 years of operations,” mentioned founders while talking about market size & opportunity.
