Exclusive: Women Only MarketPlace For On-Demand Tailoring Needs Urban Tailor Gets Seed Funding From Ex-Myntra Executives

With the advent of on-demand marketplaces, almost any errand can be run at the swipe of a hand. However the tailoring industry is still stuck in the dingy city lanes, where the masterji’s promises are big but deliveries are always late and far from our expectations.

A Bangalore-based startup, Urban Tailor, wants to address this un-met need and further guarantee perfect fit and on-time delivery with convenient pick-up & delivery at your doorstep. The company, founded by Vasudevan Thrikkazhippurath, Lavanya Venkatraman and Ashish Singhal in March 2015, has recently raised its seed funding led by a group of angel investors (mostly ex-Myntra executives). The company plans to deploy the funds raised for improving customer experience & marketing.

CEO & Co-Founder of UrbanTailor, Vasudevan tells us, “Tailoring space in India is dominated by unprofessional local tailors and boutiques, these local service units are the only way of living for the tailors and with the lack of funds, comes the restraints on workforce expansion. Due to which the only way to expand their business is by booking multiple orders per day, this working style leads to delayed delivery and misfitting product. Considering this low quality of service, customers have to switch multiple tailors before getting the desirable result and that’s where we want to make a difference.”

The Idea

Urban Tailor is a professional tailoring service for women which comes at the click of a button. Its innovative process offers free pick-up of the material to be stitched along with a garment with the perfect fit as measurement post the customers placing the order through a simple-to-use online design & customisation tool.

Vasudevan said, “We plan to primarily focus on the everyday needs of middle-aged women and secondarily also target the alterations of readymade women clothing.”

Urban Tailor holds a contract with a professional tailoring unit of a capacity to render 500 orders/day and own delivery team of 10 people. Company stitches the garment as per the provided measurement garment and claims to deliver to the customer in 10 days. Currently, it offer 4 garment types: blouse, kurta, bottoms and salwar suit. Basic stitching service starts at INR 500 onwards

How It Works?

• Customer chooses the product they would like to get stitched.
• One can customise the new product in 3 ways- ‘Copy your measurement garment’, ‘Upload your design’ and ‘Create your own design’.

• Then the order can be scheduled at user’s desired date and time.

• UrbanTailor’s delivery team then picks up the unstitched/ misfitted garment and measurement garment from customer’s address.

• And delivers the stitched and measurement garment in 10 days.

Important Figures

Average Ticket Size: INR 620

Operational Cities: Bangalore

Ratio of Old v/s New Customers:  40% are recurring

Growth Rate: 20% per week

Team Size: 15 members

Challenges Faced

The major challenge is in maintaining the quality of product. Urban Tailor’s team, manually check the measurements once the order is stitched so that the product is as per the requirements of the customers and is doesn’t misfits the customers. Company is presently operating at quality standards of 98% but plans to elevate it to 99% in near future.

Competition

According to Vasudevan, India’s tailoring industry is a $1.2 Bn market. In India, UrbanTailor competes with Bangalore-based TailorMan, which deal in tailoring of men’s clothing with product categories like suits, jackets and blazers, shirts, pants, waistcoats and accessories like pocket squares. To order online, shoppers have to submit their measurement points and the product is stitched product is delivered at the customer’s doorstep. However, TailorMan does not have any pick-up service.

Globally, the company competes with Singapore-based upTailor, one of the biggest player in tailoring industry but even upTailor targets only men’s clothing line. Also, the unique point about UrbanTailor is their guaranteed perfectly fitting garment after stitching along with delivery time of 10 days.

The rise of hyperlocal delivery model and on-demand service has seen a boom with players like LocalOye, Near.in, Taskbob, Findyahan, UrbanClap and Qyk.

The question is ‘not’, whether On-Demand Economy will revolutionize the way people transact or not; because it is already there. The question is – When  will  these services move beyond tech-savvy, early adopters – to cater a larger consumer base of tech resilient people. Because, when that happens, On-Demand Economy is bound to bring a paradigm shift in the way our life functions.