Lifestyle Brand Mayfair Raises $3.2 Mn In Seed Funding From Nexus Ventures And CDH Investments

Mayfair, a new entrant to the lifestyle and apparel ecommerce market has received a $3.2 Mn funding from Nexus Venture Partners and CDH Investments, according to a statement by the company.

Mayfair said that the round was its seed funding round and will be used to ramp up procurement and operations and to expand the team. On its Linkedin page the company has described itself as a fast-growing fashion startup with funds raised from Baidu founders.

Mayfair was founded by Chi Xue (Data Science Head at ClubFactory, Ex-Google) and Eddie Deng (Director at Alibaba) in October 2018 at Gurgaon.

The company offers affordable fashion across verticals such as clothing, accessories, and home and living products. Mayfair has a dedicated team of buyers across its offices in Italy, Shanghai, and India who curate an exclusive selection of the Italian and international high street designs, on their online platform.

Directly buying from the factories helps the company to bypass distributors, sellers and brand premium, and in turn brings down the product cost. Mayfair further uses data science and AI to track customer behaviour trends.

Industry Trends

Given to the high internet penetration and foray of more international retailers to India, the ecommerce sector has grown leaps and bounds over the past few years. As per Indian government’s Economic Survey 2018, the Indian online fashion market was pegged at $3.7 Bn in 2017, wherein Walmart-owned Flipkart, along its subsidiaries Myntra and Jabong, claims to hold a 70% share.

In the fashion ecommerce space, Mayfair competes with companies such as Flipkart’s subsidiaries Myntra and Jabong, Google-backed Fynd, FabAlley, Aditya Birla’s Forever 21, Reliance owned Ajio and others.

In February 2019, a southeast asian fashion marketplace Zilingo has raised $226 Mn in Series D funding from Sequoia Capital and others. Prior to this in December 2018, Delhi/NCR-based fashion marketplace FabAlley had raised $8.54 Mn in a Series B funding round from SAIF Partners.

Further, a Deloitte India report valued India’s ecommerce marketplace at $200 Bn and predicted its growth to $1.2 Tn by 2021. Interestingly, a 2018 IBEF (India Brand Equity Foundation) report had predicted that Indian ecommerce market will reach $200 Bn by 2026. However, it reached the $200 Bn mark in 2019 itself.

Along with a rapid growth, the Indian ecommerce sector is also going through a regulatory phase. Starting with the new FDI ecommerce rules that came into effect from February 1st.