FYND: A Fashion E-Commerce Platform Bringing Latest In-Store Fashion Online

Founded by Farooq Adam, Harsh Shah, and Sreeraman MG, Fynd is a unique fashion e-commerce portal which brings the latest in-store fashion online. The O2O company directly sources products across various categories including clothing, footwear, jewellery and accessories, from the most prominent brands in the country.

Fynd’s integrated system allows for speedy delivery within four to six hours, and a complete assurance of product quality. Initially incepted as Shopsense Retail Technology Pvt. Ltd. in 2012, the company pivoted to Fynd in November 2015, and is currently based out of Mumbai.

Harsh Shah is one of the three co-founders of Fynd, the unique fashion e-commerce portal which brings the latest in-store fashion online. He has a keen interest in consumer-facing technology in the retail sector, and specialises in management consulting.

BWDisrupt interacted with the founder of Fynd, Harsh Shah to know more about his venture.

Journey from inception to till now?
The company initially started off as Shopsense Retail Technologies in the year 2012. The company then was in B2B domain catering to the brand stores helping them enhance the customer experience and making discovery of in-store products easy. We later pivoted to Fynd in November 2015. As Fynd, we have established ourselves as a fashion e-commerce platform which helps bring the latest in-store fashion online. We are currently based out of Mumbai.

The company started off with on-boarding around 20 brands with whom we had an association earlier (as Shopsense). This basically helped us do an MVP check and then we scaled ourselves up and started on-boarding more and more brands and have now reached to a point where we have a large number of well-known brands who are selling products on Fynd,

There are 3 founders: Farooq Adam, Harsh Shah and Sreeraman MG. Harsh Shah is one of the three co-founders of Fynd. At Fynd, he brings his valuable experience in technology and entrepreneurship to the table, and oversees the supply side of operations, including managing partnering brands and stores.

Born and brought up in Mumbai, Harsh speaks four languages and hails from a family which has been in the city for three generations. He completed his graduation from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in 2010 and was already part of the entrepreneurship landscape by his second year of college. As the Head of the Entrepreneurship Cell at IIT Bombay, he directed a team of twenty students and led several programs that aimed at instilling the spirit of entrepreneurship in the Indian youth.

The other Co-Founder, Farooq Adam looks after Product, Engineering and Growth. Previously he worked as Big Data Architect advising Fortune 500 companies in the US.He holds a Master and Bachelor in Structural Engineering for IIT Bombay (2008). His Master's’ thesis was published as book and a few journal papers.

Sreeraman MG, the thirdco-founder at Fyndheads the design. A dropout from IIT Bombay’s Industrial Design Centre, he was previously in charge of design at PaGaLGuY.com. Prior to that he ran a t-shirt label which focused on fun, quirky t-shirts called MGEEZ.

How was it started and unique key feature/services and how is it diff. from existing ones?
Since the beginning of the e-commerce, industry perception has been that it is always online vs. offline and at the end of it one of them will win. We however saw a great opportunity in marrying these two forms of retail together and come up with a concept which helps us make an optimal use of both channels.

The fact that we don't hold any inventory of our own and instead source all our products directly from the brand stores stands to be our core USP. This helps us in:
1. Getting the latest (in-store) inventory online much before any other e-comm player
2. Optimizing the delivery time by sourcing the product from the store nearest to the customer
3. Providing assurance of the product quality since all orders are fulfilled directly by the brands
4. No fixed costs involved in warehousing

We are the only company in the world to do store level integrations at this scale (more than 8000+ stores). With our unique and proprietary inventory integrations, we know exactly what product is available in which store, quantity, color, size, depth, etc.

What's your current funding status?
Shopsense is backed by Kae Capital and Powai Lake Ventures.

What is your monetization model?
We help the brands generate extra orders for their stores via our platform. This helps them make optimal use of the existing resources they have already invested in. In return, we charge them a percentage commission on each order generated.

We collaborate with the brands to get their in-store inventory hosted on our portal. As and when a customer makes a purchase via Fynd, the order is passed on to the store nearest to him and the store will then process the order and pass it on to the delivery partner. The delivery partner will then make sure that the product gets delivered to the customer on time.

What are your future plans?
We look at Fynd playing a key role in the Technology x Retail space. It doesn't have to be just B2B or B2C, but everywhere technology plays an important role in retail; for brands, retailers, consumers, etc. Not just in India, but around the world as well

Though we have served more than 1.6 Mn people across the country, one of our major problem is to showcase our USPs and establish our core differentiators. Our marketing strategy, in the next phase therefore is to concentrate more on positioning ourselves in the market and let people know who we are and how are we different from any other e-commerce player in the market.

What kind of challenges faced did you face initially?
On-boarding the first set of stakeholders on both the end (customers and brands) is a difficult task to do. The brands usually map the effort against the immediate rise in sale which they can get. And since we were just starting things, it was difficult for us to convince the brands to put in efforts in integrating their inventory with our system.

There are 7M lifestyle stores in India (not counting other geographies that we have set our sights on). Retail is going to be a 1Tn$ opp by 2020 in India alone. Helping retailers sell better and helping consumers buy better.