Singapore’s Browzzin Looks To Make Inroads In Indian Social Commerce With $5 Mn Investment

Singapore-based fashion-focused social commerce platform Browzzin is planning to invest $5 Mn in its India business to catalogue domestic and international labels, offering over 3 Mn products in the country. The company made a soft-entry in India in December 2020.

The company claims to have registered more than 250K downloads in India since its launch and is looking to target more than 5 Mn users in the country this year. Besides this, Browzzin is hoping to drive gross merchandise value (GMV) of over $400 Mn for partner brands and labels with this latest investment.

The social commerce platform allows fashion influencers to curate looks and drive traffic for brands and marketplace, by enabling users to discover similar or featured brands. The company charges partners as it helps them drive sales.

In order to expand in India, Browzzin will tie up with large marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra as well as with independent Indian brands. Sumanto Das, country director of India at Browzzin, said that they have identified several brands which a lot of influencers promote. These brands will be a big part of Browzzin’s fashion catalogue here.

The company was founded in 2016 by Zean Vo and Harry Markl, who finds the Indian market quite interesting in many ways. “One is, this whole influencer marketing in fashion may still be in an infant phase… it is more developed in the U.S. and Europe, but it has significant growth potential in India. Second, obviously, there is a huge digital population. Third, there are more upcoming Indian fashion brands that also help us localize our catalogue,”  he added.

The Indian social commerce segment may be at a nascent stage at this point but it is poised to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55%-60% to reach $16 Bn-$20 Bn gross merchandise value (GMV) by 2025.

One of the biggest milestones of the segment has to be Meesho’s entry into the unicorn club, which will have an overall impact on the segment and its growth momentum. The company claims to have registered 100K registered suppliers to over 26K postal codes across 4,800 cities, generating over INR 500 Cr ($68 Mn at current conversion rate) in income for individual entrepreneurs.

Other startups in this segment are DealShare, which recently raised $9.2 Mn in debt from Alteria Capital, CityMall and BulBul. DealShare claims to serve about 25K orders a day and has partnered with 1000 brands. CityMall has a network of 20K community leaders and services about 200K customers. BulBul has more than 280K customers on its platform, as of October 2019.