Purplle.com - A Personalised Beauty Discovery Platform with 650 Brands and 50,000 Products

A personalised beauty discovery platform, Purplle.com, is the largest beauty catalogue with 650 brands and 50,000 products which gathers beauty profiles from consumers and, uses proprietary beauty knowledge engine, personalise the beauty buying experience for consumers.

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How did you manage to fund this idea?
The initial money came from founders savings and support from people we had worked with earlier. In 2012, the market for online beauty was very nascent so the bet was on the team we had put together to execute.

Do you observe any emerging trend in users?
Indian consumers are starting to experiment. Close to 70% of our audience is looking for the new product in one or more beauty categories which is specifically solves their issue. Consumers are very interested in knowing what is inside a product. There are lot of niche brands which are giving significant fight to the large incumbents with their innovative products and we as a platform make it extremely cost effective for these brands to reach out the right audience.

Do you have an app?
We have app across android and iOS platform. It is the best rated beauty shopping app in India. We have close to a million downloads across both the apps.

Has the business grown so far?
Beauty as a category is exploding and online is leading the way. We have served about 15 lakh customers over the last four years. There are 650 plus brands that we work with and around 50,000 products. Our repeat customer base is 70% and we started making money operationally last year while growing the business by 250%. We should be EBIDTA positive in a couple of months.

What are your future plans?
We are targeting a 250-300% growth on a YoY basis and our first EBIDTA positive year in FY18. We are betting on our proprietary beauty engine based personalisation to keep our CAC low and increase customer repeat further. We have also signed up 10-12 international beauty brands exclusively for Indian territory and working on our private brands alongside. We are using very segmented consumer data to launch these products and expecting higher turnaround time as well as hit rate as compared to traditional incumbents from trend capture to product development and launch.