Blinge.in : Creating An Affordable Premium Fashion Experience For The Masses

Blinge launched in September, 2015 is an Indian strategic marketplace model for rentals with a community of 20+ brands and designers. They provide designer wear, branded outfits and elegant accessories on rent. It is a brainchild of three IITians from Raipur(Shashwat Gopal, Shikhar Khanna and Pooja Dubey) which started with the aim of creating an affordable premium fashion experience for the masses. It is creating a market that has a huge potential to become a billion dollar industry and disrupt the fashion sector in India. The portal has around 500 styles &has been backed up by industry veterans in their journey. Blinge is already riding on 50% growth month-on-month when it comes to orders and is successfully catering to over 1000 customers within a span of few months. The application is on android and has 20,000 downloads and counting.

Team BWDisrupt Interacts With Shikhar Khanna, Founder, Blinge And Spoke To Him

What was the triggering moment when you left your stable job and started a new venture? What was the motivation behind it?

Solving inefficiency and optimizing processes have always motivated me. Major trigger to start the company was when Shashwat (Co-founder @Blinge) and I shifted to Mumbai and met Pooja (Co-founder @Blinge). Every month she had to attend innumerable events and dressing well was necessary to keep a good social score which ultimately resulted in spending a huge chunk of her salary in making additions to her wardrobe. We them contemplated, how dressing up impeccably has now become a pivotal part of everyone’s life. After deep conversations we realized how buying a lehenga for 50,000 and wearing it just once or twice before you start ignoring it and then end up making your wardrobe a mess is quite a famous process. Will the cost of buying the outfit be justified? Hence, BLINGE.

From where did you raise funds?

We had raised first round of funds in October 2015. The funding was led by Anupam Mittal, Founder and CEO of People Group, Anuj Srivastava, Co-founder and CEO, Livspace and Ankit Nagori, Former, CBO, Flipkart.

How do you differentiate yourself from the companies that offer the same services?

Blinge distinguishes itself from others companies offering on-demand rental services in the following categories:-

Business Model- We do not buy inventory and get designers to rent by providing them a platform. Blinge is the only company which follows this model. We have created a marketplace for rentals which does not exist globally and have been able to crack the supply to keep the inventory with them and ensure fulfilment for greater customer experience

Customer Experience- User can pre-book, choose variable number of rental days on their convenience. We do not enforce the number of days and dates of rental on user

Product- We don't just rent individual apparel but provide specialized designer picks, which is a collection of apparel, bags, jewellery etc as a package

What cities you are active in? And what cities do you plan to cover in future?

We are currently in Mumbai and soon plan to operate in other metros too.

For how long does Blinge rent out clothes?

We don't have a fixed number of rental days. We understand people going out for a destination weddings have a very different requirement from someone who is going for her friend's sangeet in the same city. We have modelled our product in such a way to accommodate people who would want to rent for a night, to people who would want to rent for a week.

How do you position your brand? What marketing strategies do you flow or planning to follow in future?

Blinge is an aspiring brand for the Indian masses. We believe in social proof, and that is exactly what we promote via influencer marketing and referral marketing campaigns.