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After 14 years of stories about entrepreneurs and startups, YourStory is bringing you a new perspective with YS Life, our premium lifestyle and cultural magazine. 

Through YS Life, we hope you find a little guidance away from the hustle of the daily grind with the best things and experiences in life, as well as how to get more out of it. 

You can also tell us what you think of the first edition of YS Life at editorial@yourstory.com. 

In other news, SoftBank has slashed the valuation of its investment in hotel aggregator unicorn OYO from $3.4 billion to $2.7 billion. This comes amid the company’s plans for an initial public offering, reported Bloomberg.

Did you know emojis turned 40 this year? Here’s a look back.

Seems like only yesterday the internet was in an uproar when the face with tears emoji (😂) became the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2015. 

Cue: Eye roll (🙄).

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Meesho’s festive season outlook
• Festive sales with Myntra 
• Crypto investing made easier 

Here’s your trivia for today: Who was the first person to observe Saturn’s rings?

Ecommerce 

Meesho’s festive season outlook

Bengaluru-based ecommerce company Meesho expects its daily order volume to grow to 60-70 lakh as part of its upcoming festive sales, said top executives at the company. 

Meesho started in 2015 as a social commerce platform with resellers, mostly women, evangelising its platform to its local communities. At present, direct selling makes up 80% of the business while reseller business accounts for 20% of the business in volume terms. 

In your cart:

• The SoftBank-backed company saw nearly 56 lakh orders per day as part of its day-long monthly sales in July 2022. 
• The company has planned two sale events ahead of Diwali—September 23-27 and October 7-11. 
• Besides the growth in the number of daily orders, the platform sees nearly 50% of customers transacting on an ecommerce app for the first time during the sale.

Funding Alert

Startup: Light Microfinance

Amount: Rs 196 Cr

Round: Series B

Startup: Deep Rooted

Amount: $12.5M

Round: Undisclosed

Startup: FS Life

Amount: Rs 50 Cr

Round: Pre-Series B

Ecommerce 

Myntra’s ‘biggest’ sale 

Myntra is stacking up international labels, including Macy’s, H&M Home, and direct-to-consumer brands, as it prepares to ride an anticipated bounce-back in festive season shopping this year.

The Walmart-owned fashion e-tailer expects its upcoming festive sale, Big Fashion Festival, which kicks off today to be its biggest sale event ever–projecting a 20% increase in the number of unique shoppers.

Sale, sale, sale:

• Myntra is targeting 100 brand launches for the upcoming festive season sales. 
• Customers will have access to about 6,000 brands and over 1.5 million styles on the platform—50% higher than during last year’s festive season sale.
• In terms of scale, it is expecting six million unique customers to shop on its platform this festive season, up from over five million customers last year.

Cryptocurrency 

Investing made easier 

Time and again in the world of cryptocurrency, posts by influencers about the hottest coin have swayed markets and impelled investors—especially retail—to put in their bids. Because the market is so new, incalculable and hard to understand, new-to-market investors have found themselves largely left to their own devices when it comes to investing in cryptocurrency.

Archit and Rachit Bansal’s startup Coinmint helps solve these issues.

Protect your crypto:

• Founded in 2022, CoinMint offers investors—amateur and seasoned alike—the option to let experts handle cryptocurrency investments on their behalf via curated portfolios.
• Investors can review these expert-curated portfolios and pick strategies that fit their risk profiles best.
• So far, CoinMint has raised $500,000 in angel funding from Unacademy’s Gaurav Munjal, CRED’s Kunal Shah, Udaan’s Sujeet Kumar, and funds such as Blume Ventures and Titan Capital.

News & updates

• Bold actions: Japan intervened to support the yen for the first time since 1998, seeking to stem a 20% decline against the dollar this year amid a widening policy divergence with the US. The intervention indicates how a pain threshold had been reached as hedge funds kept adding to short bets on the yen.
• Road not taken: Former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen announced a new nonprofit with the goal of making social media healthier. Haugen has become a well-known figure since leaking tens of thousands of pages of internal documents and later revealing her identity on “60 Minutes” last year. 
• A tell-all: Former President Donald Trump’s business practices included some eyebrow-raising moments, such as once being paid with gold bars that were wheeled into his Trump Tower apartment, according to a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

Who was the first person to observe Saturn’s rings?

Answer: Galileo Galilei in 1610. However, it was in 1655 that Christiaan Huygens became the first person to describe them as “a disk surrounding Saturn”. 

We would love to hear from you! To let us know what you liked and disliked about our newsletter, please mail editorial@yourstory.com. 

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