A penchant for dressing but seldom finding the perfect fit with readymade garments led Gurugram-based physician Drishti Anand to turn to entrepreneurship and set up an online platform which helps women get perfectly dressed outfits delivered to their doorsteps.
“I have always been someone who enjoys dressing up, but readymade clothes have a dimension and fit issue,” states Drishti. It meant she had to pay a few visits to tailors and stalls within weeks, even months.
In 2018, to make sure her loved ones would not confront a similar scenario leading up to her husband ’s wedding, she took on the responsibility of getting their outfits stitched by tailors.
Yet a day before the wedding, she realised several garments needed alterations, there were quality issues, and a few fabrics hadn’t been stitched punctually.
“That has been the last straw,” states Drishti.
She spoke to over 1,000 women about whether they too had faced difficulties with the stitching and fitting of their clothes. All of them said it had been a problem, more so for all those aged 35-55.
Drishti found that over 80 percent of outfits in their own wardrobes were stitched end to end or altered versions of readymade outfits.
Hence, in September 2019, she set LetsDressUp with her husband Aditya Balani, that previously worked with a management consultant firm.
The designer working on the cloth
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Holes in the cloth
Before launching her start up, Drishti spent months at various tailoring boutiques and units attempting to understand their pain issues.
She found master were spending 30 percent less time cutting and stitching fabrics, which had been their forte, along with also more time haggling with clients, taking their dimensions, imagining their layout tastes and taking care of fabrics, not one of which had been their core skill.
“Many occasions, they were seen struggling to suggest designs to women. All this led to suboptimal results for your buyer and the seller,” states Drishti.
The offline installation, consisting of tailors, boutiques along with other units, was also highly unstructured and complies with issues including inconsistent quality, opaque pricingand absence of timelines and the need for numerous alterations before the perfect fit was achieved.
The team ties up with individual tailors and provides them requests based on what the group receives online. “Improper fits were the principal motive behind the fashion business scoring the maximum return rate of items, 40 percent of which was driven by ecommerce websites as I found during my first days of hit,”states Drishti. The problem has been aggravated by the fact that India lacks its size chart.
The greatest challenge, she adds, was supplying a client personalisation in a more comfortable manner. The group also had to scale back during the initial two months of the lockdown. However, were soon able to bounce back and begin operations.
“We have managed to overcome this by building a technology-first solution based on powerful user insights,” Drishti states.
A tailor made on the platform
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A mutually venture
Operating with a group of 10 people at present, LetsDressUp has assembled an end-to-end technology stack that brings clients, logistics partners, tailor partners along with the startup’s central hub together in one area.
All a customer has to do is visit the LetsDressUp site, pick the date when the cloth will be picked up from her house and pick the sort of outfit she wants from LetsDressUp’s catalog. Then, the client puts her up specifications to the site and some other specific needs for your garments.
The platform has interactions and instructions for the same, followed closely by finalising of the plan, this layout is customised according to the needs of their client.
The stitched and fitted thing according to her specifications will be home-delivered within a week. The selection of outfits at the moment are mostly Indian, Western, and ethic. Founded in Gurugram now, the group felt the need of women consumers needed to be addressed first.
In the backend, the logistics partner picks up the cloth from the client and delivers it to the assigned tailor made partner. This is based upon the plan, the needs of the client, and the skill-level of the tailor. The material is stitched and quality-checked in house from the LetsDressUp group, before being delivered to the client.
The platform charges clients for every single perfect fit it executes. Charges are typically 10-20 percent higher than those in a typical tailoring boutique or unit.
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Rapid growth
“Every outfit which we are executing is similar to a data stage,” states Drishti, “And with enough data points, we will be the very first ones to maintain India’s dimension chart. We’ll also leverage this information to make readymade apparel and function as go-to companion for brands to market perfect-fit outfits. This will allow us to build India’s variant of Stitch Fix. ”
US-based Stitch Fix is a online personal styling service which uses recommendation algorithms and information science to offer tailor-made clothing according to size, budget, and style.
Back in India, startups like Urban Tailor, and more lately Fablestreet, which is mostly restricted to proper wear, follow an identical version.
The women’s formal wear market is one of those fastest-growing markets across the world. The customised clothes market based on markets and research is likely to expand at a CAGR of about six percent during 2017-2024, with revenue reaching over $690 billion by 2024.
In accordance with Drishti, what generates LetsDressUp’s business model exceptionally scalable is the fact that it functions like the production device of a readymade apparel brand, where supply-side inefficiencies of design components are eliminated even as clients are offered the personalisation of an outfit tailored for their own specifications.
“LetsDressUp has been rising at 25 percent month-on-month within the previous six months,” she states, “At the current rate we will be in ARR of Rs 100 crore in a couple of decades. ”
The creator claims the platform clocks an average order value of Rs 2,000, with gross margins of nearly 50 percent and participation margins of near 15 percent.
The platform’s rapid development has also brought in funding. The group has increased angel investment in Kearney Country Head Kaushika Madhavan, Kearney partner Saurabh Singh, and chief Sudeep Maheshwari; Abhishek Malhotra, Partner-Consumer Practice at McKinsey & Co; Farmery Founder and former CEO Vivek Kuttappan; BlackWatch Advisors LLC VP Gautam Midha, along with IIFL COO Anshuman Maheshwary.
(Edited by Lena Saha and Saheli Sen Gupta)
Article Source and Credit yourstory.com https://yourstory.com/2020/12/womens-tailored-apparel-startup-letsdressup-right-fit Buy Tickets for every event – Sports, Concerts, Festivals and more buytickets.com
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