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Shopatplaces, a region specific online brand that offers authentic products from the places has bagged a funding by Indian Angel Networks, Asia’s largest angel network. Shopatplaces curates the things special to a place and sells them online at best price.
In case you wanted to buy an original Pashmina Shawls from Kashmir, you can do so with a simple click of the button. The startup was founded a couple of years back in 2012 by Sherfur Rehman an MBA from NITIE who had also worked at Cadbury’s along with Zuhaib Khan, has worked across Investment Banking and equity firms like JP Morgan, Mape Advisory and Casa.
As of now Shopatplaces is focused primarily on Apparel and Accessories. The store also has some interesting collection of Jewellery, Bags, Shoes, Fragances and Home Décor. The company is gearing up to enter into the personal care category and cover all the 29 states.
Zuhaib Khan, Co-founder at Shopatplaces said “IAN’s investment will enable us to further build our Product Portfolio and Service. We aim to delight our customers with the widest range of high quality products, sourced directly from the places they are created at. Moving ahead, we plan to improve Marketing to reach our target customer segment and scale up the Technology Front-end and Back-end Infrastructure. We aim to be the Top of the Mind recall for the customers when they think of locally crafted products from any city. On the technology front, an app will be rolled out for customers to shop on the go”
IAN Lead Investor, B. Hari was head quoting that “At IAN we were extremely excited with Zuhaib and Sherfur’s passion, enthusiasm, and business acumen to build a great company. And combined with Shopatplaces’ scalable online experience to well thought through customer base. Shopatplaces is poised to pioneer the online shopping experience of specialty merchandise from across the nation and then from across the globe. There was tremendous investor interest at IAN & the company raised monies in literally minutes!”
Thanks to the E-commerce boom the market is flooded with Online portals planning to lock horns with biggies like Myntra and Flipkart. Shopatplaces has a unique value proposition since it is trying to tap into a previously unexplored market. In the future they can also leverage their local reach and ship to International buyers. It solves the problem related to authenticity, availability and pricing of the products, on the other hand it will also increase the marketing horizon for the vendors.
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