Social Commerce Startup Trell Acquires Women’s Self Care Platform Womaniya

Bengaluru-based lifestyle social commerce startup Trell has acquired Womaniya, a community focused on women’s self care, for an undisclosed sum. Womaniya is a mobile application only for women, full of trusted information around pregnancy with original videos, infographics, and articles. The community also provides support from gynecologists and experts in a question-answer format and live sessions. 

The application also supports a community forum, where women talk about various aspects of life, including relationships, health and wellness, lifestyle interests and many more.

Founded in 2016 by Arun Lodhi, Bimal Kartheek Rebba, Prashant Sachan and Pulkit Agrawal, Trell has been focusing on enabling people to create visual collections of their lifestyle experiences. It allows users to share their short videos to connect with like-minded individuals, discover lifestyle trends and share content around their interests and passions across categories such as beauty, fashion, wellness, health, food, TV reviews, travel, and gadgets.

The integration of Trell and Womaniya will result in a more comprehensive solution to improve efficiency, help, and facilitate collaborations among the women’s community, said the company.

 “We are happy to welcome Womaniya’s impressive team to the Trell family. Womaniya is a great strategic fit for Trell and will create significant value for the community of women who account for more than 60% of our user base, and they generate more than 72% of the content on Trell. With Womaniya’s expertise and Trell’s reach, we will create innovative solutions that educate and empower women, as well as provide them with financial inclusion and the freedom to monetise through social commerce,” said Pulkit Agrawal, CEO and Co-founder of Trell.

 “Through Womaniya, we were able to build a strong community of over 400K women from tier-2 and tier-3 cities of India. To grow and reach out to more women with credible sources, we always wanted to explore how a sustainable business can be built on a community foundation. Trell, as a social commerce platform, has successfully integrated commerce with the content and community offerings,” said Siddharth Kothari and Lakhan Suchdev, Founders of Womaniya.

 The Buzz In The Social Commerce Plus Content Ecosystem

Social commerce is worth $1.5 to $2 Bn GMV market today and is likely to hit $60 Bn to $70 Bn in 2030. Accelerated by the pandemic, the ecosystem is estimated to grab 5% of the Indian ecommerce market at a CAGR of 65% between 2020 to 2025. Trell has currently over 100 Mn downloads and over 50 Mn monthly active users on its app. The company also claims to be garnering over 20 Bn monthly views from across 2,000 cities in India.

In August 2020, Trell also launched its social commerce section on the app, enabling users to watch personalised product recommendations across beauty, personal care and wellness categories that they can buy from within the app.  Trell onboarded over 500 personal care and beauty brands in the last few months, with the most recent addition of Maybelline, L’Oréal and Garnier.

A similar space is increasingly being targeted by D2C brands who are building their content ecosystem by acquiring companies with a loyal customer base. D2C beauty and personal care startup MyGlamm recently acquired Mumbai-based parenting platform BabyChakra following the acquisition of another platform PoPxo last year — as it plans to grow to be the largest 3C (Content + Community + Commerce) company in South Asia. With this acquisition, MyGlamm will be investing INR 100 Cr in BabyChakra over the next three years.

Together, MyGlamm, POPxo and BabyChakra represent a community of over 80 Mn women in the 16-35 years age bracket. MyGlamm has produced and sold beauty products across makeup, skincare, and personal care, and has over 220,000 influencers on its platforms who fuel its content marketing strategy.

According to the Inc42 Plus D2C report, popular beauty brands such as Revlon and Lotus took around 20 years to reach the INR 100 Cr revenue mark. But new-age startups like Mamaearth and SUGAR Cosmetics took just four years to cross the same milestone. Rajan Anandan, managing director at the venture capital firm Sequoia India and Surge, says India has more than 80 Mn high intent beauty buyers on content platforms, and these people are waiting to discover new products.