The start-up story of Online Fashion brand: Voonik
Voonik is an online marketplace operating in products for women’s fashion. Voonik was founded in 2013 by Sujayath Ali and Navaneetha Krishnan. The company is based in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Voonik helps its users choose fashion apparel from an online shopping app. The startup was launched as a personal mobile application, before developing a website. Voonik provides everything to the women consumers with a vast collection of fashionable products from Indian and International manufacturers at low prices to suit every budget and reliable delivery. They also include Indian wear, western wear, sleepwear, footwear, bags, accessories, beauty products, etc.
In 2015, the company had raised $5 Million Series A round of funding from Sequoia India. In the financial year 2016, Voonik incurred losses of over $12.8 million, while revenue stood at $2.4 million. Between 2013 and 2016, the fashion retailer raised close to $27 million in funding from investors like Sequoia Capital, Times Internet, Seedfund, Beenos, BEENEXT, Parkwood Bespin, and Tancom Investment. In the year 2017, the Sequoia Capital-backed company funded a revenue of Rs 1.17 billion and $6 million from RB investments. This sudden jump in revenue prompted the Voonik team to focus on profitability.
Voonik needed to cut expenses as they were burning money on every shipment. Voonik observed its shipment cost across all categories and took corrective measures to make shipments more cost-efficient.
The next biggest money burner was marketing. To cut cost in marketing, they had to stop using traditional channels that others were using and focused on innovative marketing channels like referral programmes that would help them to make money. By the end of the year in December 2017, Voonik was able to make a profit.
Pic. Credit: Amazon.com
Recently, the company saw an opportunity in private labels and planned to invest in it. It was a huge challenge for Voonik as it did not have any experience of doing private labels.
As of the December 2017 year, the company claimed to have an annual GMV rate of over $120 million, with over 20 million registered users and around 17 million app downloads. Furthermore, Voonik has more than 15 Lakh products on its platform from 22,000 sellers
Voonik made good brand recognition among people in the fashion segment. At this point, Voonik gets more than 90% of sales from the app, while only 10% comes from their desktop site. Voonik now had tie-ups with the Jabong, Fashionara, Zovi, Snapdeal and so many more. They are now a one-stop-solution to all the fashion needs of customers, and they could now use the site to buy various products from different eCommerce stores, just by a single click.
Voonik had a very encouraging customer response in 2018 with 15,000 monthly transactions. It plans to take this number to 50,000 monthly transactions in 2019. The company will be expanding to new cities in 2019. Scaling up commercial real estate is also going to be an important objective for 2019. Voonik looks to be in top gear as it plans to double their business and grow it by 100% by the end of 2019.