Online beauty and personal care site Purplle.com has raised undisclosed amount in funding round led by IvyCap Ventures. Purplle had previously raised undisclosed amount in funding in 2013 led by Blume Ventures, Mumbai Angels and Chennai Angels in Pre-Series A.
Purplle has tied up with more than 7,000 salons, spas; skin care and hair care chains across Mumbai and plans to take that number up to 50,000 across 30 cities by the end of this year. It plans to cross the annualized sales of $30-40 Mn by this year end.
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Manish Taneja, founder Purplle.com says, “The undisclosed amount of funds will be used to create a TripAdvisor-like marketplace for discovery of beauty and grooming products and services. Our plan is to stay in the beauty vertical, stick to online and not diversify into offline and make our international foray soon. The focus going forward is to establish a hyper local beauty community, the discovery process will further lead to purchase of product and services.”
Purplle.com is a three year old Mumbai based startup founded by IIT-Delhi alumnus Manish Taneja and IIM-Ahmedabad graduate Rahul Dash.
It competes with Nykaa which had raised $3.4 Mn in funding last year. Besides these, specialized players, subscription-based discovery commerce players like Fab Bag also operate in the online beauty space.
Vertical ecommerce startups in the beauty and grooming space haven’t been able to scale up in size as horizontal biggies Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon have dominated the market by offering huge discounts and a vast selection.
UrbanTouch, one of the first startups in this category, which was acquired by Fashion and You for $30 Mn in 2012, was shut down a year later.
We caught up with Manish Taneja, for a small chat, here are the excerpts:
Inc42: How do you plan to use the funds raised ?
Manish: We would be looking at aggressive expansion in the beauty vertical both from a products and services side. Mobile and Brand Building would be two heavy focus areas in the next 6 months
Inc42: How did year 2014 went for Purplle?
Manish: 2014 was a great learning experience I would say. We did our fair share of mistakes and thankfully have come out stronger. We have grown by 4 times in our beauty product marketplace business and by 10 times in our salon and spa finder business.
Inc42: What all new can we expect this year?
Manish: We are targeting $40-50 Mn GMV run rate and 25000 products, 50000 salons and spas but end of this year.
Inc42: Please share the number of categories and products available on the website currently.
Manish: Currently, there are over 12 Categories, 15000 Products and 7000 Salons listed.
Inc42: How much revenue are you earning? And what are your targets for this year?
Manish: We are doing about a 1000 transactions daily on the platform with a ticket size of INR 1100- INR 1200.
