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Bangalore-based fashion ecommerce startup Eat.Shop.Love (ESL) has raised $3.5 Mn in angel funding from a London-based investor. The company which was a vendor-sourcing model has now moved on to creating exclusive brand with in house designers. ESL had previously raised $1 Mn in seed funding last year in October.
“There is a real improvement in the design and quality of the experience that we offer, at the scale we want to go at, when we have everything inhouse,” said cofounder Oindrila Sengupta who is a 27-year-old mother of two. She has handled fashion brands at multiple media houses in the past.
ESL (Eat.Shop.Love), the three most important things that defines the quality of a woman’s lifestyle. Dedicated towards building an exclusive and assorted fashion ecommerce site for women, ESL was founded in May 2014 to meet the needs of urban women who enjoy the autonomy of choosing their own lifestyle when it comes to fashion and travel. The company now delivers 175-200 orders every day – a figure that Sengupta aims to double by the end of the year – with an average order size of Rs 900.
According to the company, the funds will be used for hiring a dedicated design team and setting up manufacturing units, also the firm will be looking to expand it’s brand in Delhi and Mumbai. The IIM-Bangalore graduate, Sengupta, hopes to offer a 24-hour delivery by this July, when the first in-house collection will be launched.
To establish a strong brand from scratch, Dasgupta’s husband Shayak Sen, the former head of user experience at online housing portal CommonFloor, has joined as cofounder, while designer-entrepreneur Achyutha Sharma works as head of brand and marketing.
ESL is about to launch ‘Earthmade’ – a collaborative initiative with small-scale entrepreneurs from the handicraft industry. This collection will showcase handmade soaps, terracotta jewellery and handmade packaging papers. The company is also working on revamping their website to surprising their customers with a lot soon.
In this space, just last month Gurgaon-based LimeRoad raised over $30 Mn in a funding round led by Tiger Global and its existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix Partners. While another Gurgaon-based fashion discovery site, Roposo.com also raised $5 Mn in series A round of funding from Tiger Global Management.
As per a research by Morgan Stanley, India’s online retail market is expected to cross $100 Bn mark by 2020 with fashion expected to account for about 30% of the total market.
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