Hippily offers daily curation of trendy fashion products, looks and collections to the style conscious young women, which is also available for purchase.
The philosophy behind Hippily is to de-addict the fashion ecosystem from discounts by providing the user a personalised feed that learns from dozens of data points. It claims to observe intense engagement and repeat purchases from a core audience; and over 50 percent of its orders are for undiscounted products.
Launched in June 2014 as a fashion discovery platform, Hippily has gone under a whole overhaul process. In January 2016, it revamped itself into a fashion discovery-cum-shopping platform. Today, the app has 25, 000 downloads on the Android platform.
The stores section of the app has over 30 stores from cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru that are tied up as partners with Hippily.
About Founders Hippily is founded by Dr. Viswanath Ramachandran (B.Tech. Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Bombayand Ph.D. Computer Science, Brown University) and Prajakt Deolasee (B.E., co-founder Snapstick, exited to Rovi Corporation). The duo previously worked together at GupShup where Dr. Ramachandran was co-founder & COO Sanchita Ghoshroy (MBA, IIM Cal), from a Fashion Management and Marketing background is on the team as CMO.
Sujata Sangwan Interacts With Viswanath Ramachandran, CEO & Co-founder, Hippily And Spoke To Him
How did the entrepreneurial bug bite you? I (Vishy) was very interested in product and fashion discovery for a while, ever since I realized that my wife was a personal fashion discovery agent for her friends. She was very interested in finding and buying new (often unbranded) clothes, shoes and accessories from local stores - which her friends then were inspired by. I thought this was an interesting phenomenon to bring online, and was able to excite my co-founder Prajakt as well, to work on this together.
We started more as a social discovery app for fashion, with a plan to build a chat feature around shopping. We were able to get an office near IIT Bombay and hired a small team to build the product. We launched the product, learned from users behavior and started making continuous changes.
Along the way, there was a key learning that users wanted Hippily to select and recommend the best products, so we hired a fabulous fashion team to curate our fashion offering. We also sharpened the focus to fashion (and dropped home decor and other categories). As we progressed, we found the most engagement on women's fashion and took a call to focus on that.
Once we established ourselves as good curators of fashion, the user feedback and data drove us to offer the ability to buy products inside our app, and also to focus on emerging brands who want to build a voice, personality and audience online.
About Hippily Fashion shopping app for women in India, focused on emerging brands. Hippily which is a blend of the words Hip and Happily, is a name that came to the founder in a dream. Starting with a strong technology base, Hippily has now built an awesome Fashion and Marketing team as well. We have signed up over 50 strong emerging brands to be listed on the platform. We have a strong core and growing audience of fashion forward women.
How was it started? We believe in making progress by doing. And so we don't do a lot of analysis - but prefer to start anything via execution. We got an office that a friend kindly allowed us to use, hired the engineers and got started writing code.
Unique Key Feature/Services Our key value proposition is the curation of fashion. We see fashion products as being rated on price, style and quality and we seek to ensure that all products curated by Hippily score well on all these three factors. The user can rest assured that we have done the hard work to find the best stuff for her.
How is it different from existing ones? We are focused primarily on emerging brands, and we allow them to have a personality on our platform. While fashion is a huge space and therefore has multiple large players and start-ups, we believe that Hippily has carved out it's own unique brand personality and trust.
Funding Status We have raised $500K in angel funding from angels across India, USA and Singapore. People such as Sridhar Ramaswamy - SVP, Ads and Commerce of Google and Rakesh Mathur, Founder of Junglee have invested. We are all set for the next year. We are focused on our product and customers not funding.
Monetization Model Hippily sees itself as a commission based marketplace for fashion. We enable transactions and take a percentage of those transactions. Our technology enables us to present a personalized feed to users, improving transaction rates.
Traction DetailsWe have over 1 lakh users per month and processing few thousand orders per month.
Future Plans Our goals are to really improve our personalization technology so that the experience for users is even more delightful. We are really very focused on this over the next year. Plus of course scaling transactions and improving the end to end customer experience.
Marketing Plans We plan to scale our marketing to have over a million users a month and processing tens of thousands of orders a month over the next year. It's very critical for us however, to scale without discounting. We believe in matching the right products to the right users and thereby selling at a price that is good for everyone, the users, the sellers and the platform viz. Hippily. We have used multiple digital platforms including Facebook and Instagram and also offline promotions and events to drive adoption and awareness of Hippily. Hippily was one of the sponsors of this years festival at NIFT Mumbai, enabling us to reach out to a large audience of fashion forward professionals and also learn from this target segment via engaging with them.
Challenges Faced Commerce was a new space for the founders. We have worked in a wide variety of consumer and enterprise products but never commerce before. It was certainly difficult to understand how users think, and how this market works. But we've been very resilient and persistent to learn what works and what doesn't.
Market Size & Opportunity Fashion in India is a gigantic market worth tens of billions of dollars and even online fashion is few billion and growing. So we are attacking a fertile, large and growing market. The opportunity here is to be the trusted fashion recommender to millions of Indian women, and then to look at scaling to other demographics as well as geographies.
