Bangalore Based Fashion Etailer Fashionara Shuts Down Operations

Bangalore based fashion etailer, Fashionara, has shut down its operations. The company was founded by former Reliance Trends CEO Arun Sirdeshmukh along with Darpan Munjal, former chief technology officer at Times Internet Ltd, in 2012.

The company’s website is not working since last week and there has been hardly any update on the social media channels from a couple of days except from the automated scheduled tweets.

Co-founder Darpan Munjal had left the company in January this year, as confirmed by him. He is currently operating Squadhelp.com, a Crowdsourcing platform helping startups and businesses across the globe building memorable brands.

The company was backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Helion Venture Partners, and had raised over $4 Mn Series A. There were also news about the startup raising $7-8 Mn in year 2014 and shifting to a marketplace model from being a pure-play fashion portal.

Messages sent to Arun did not elicit any response, however, in an emailed response, Bejul Somaia of Lightspeed said, “Lightspeed exited its position some time back and are no longer an investor so we can’t comment on your email. Suggest you contact the company directly.”

The company’s net sales jumped five-fold to INR 32.86 Cr. in the financial year 2014-15. But its net loss widened to INR 32.13 Cr. from INR 21.11 Cr. in 2013-14.

It had a 25,000-sft central warehousing facility in Bangalore from where it ships out the products to key cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune through various air and on-the-ground logistic tie-ups.

The portal was initially focused upon categories such as apparel, footwear and accessories. In early 2014, it introduced  F.Lea Bazaar, where it enabled selected sellers from the flea markets across the country to retail their products on its portal.

Later in 2015, riding on the wave of growing smartphone and internet ecosystem of the country, it came up with its mobile android app with the flash sale model. Flash Sales implied for sale events where limited number of products are available for limited period at deep discounts. Some of the brands that can be bought on Fashionara under these events included Red Tape, Von Dutch, Biba, Clarks, Twillory, Puma, Levis and many more.

In the same year, it also entered into the home furnishing market, along with Flipkart and Snapdeal, with the launch of 36 brands, 7500 products across 7 new categories.

It was competing with portals such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Myntra, Jabong, Koovs, etc.