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From few thousand to crores, the e-commerce fashion industry has a new entrant — Beyoung — which has made its mark in the segment since its launch in 2018. The apparel startup has clocked in annual revenue of Rs 21 crore in FY 2020-21 from its earlier Rs 5 crore in FY 2019-20.

Launched by siblings Shivam Soni, Sakshi Soni, and Shivani Soni, the Udaipur-based home-grown fashion brand is involved in the sales of manufacturing and accessories designed to make people feel young.

Birth of a youthful brand

While Shivam comes from a financial background, his sister Shivani is a fashion designer and the brain behind all the designs that star on the brand’s website. In addition, Sakshi handles the marketing team and Shankar Mali oversees the brand’s supply chain and operations. What started off with a core team of just four members has now grown to 110 people.

Shivam was in his final year of college when vertical e-commerce sites were on the rise. While some of them were doing customisations and plus-sizes, others were focusing on merchandising, and this gap triggered the siblings to launch a platform that offered all the options in the same space, while also being pocket-friendly. Currently, Beyoung caters to the target age group of 15-40 and has hubs across more than 30 cities that deliver their goods across the country.

Embracing the competition

But what makes Beyoung stand apart? “While The Souled Store is doing really great at merchandising, Bewakoof excels in quirky products. What we have done to make our brand different is to embrace all these USPs and present products like plus-size customisable combos, which you cannot find on any other platform,” says Shivam.

Users can pick any size and colour of their products from any category and create a combo for themselves. While every fashion site plays its own game, Beyoung has always focused on maintaining its position in the affordable segment. Shivam says, “We offer combos like four t-shirts for as low as Rs 1,000, which is again our core USP. Even the merchandising and plus-size products are available in the affordable segment, which has been helpful in capturing the market of Tier-I and II cities.”

While it was clear for the founders of Beyoung that they would take their business online from day one, they opened three offline stores in Rajasthan before the pandemic hit. The two waves of the pandemic forced them to shut stores, but Shivam says that the plan to open experience stores in Rajasthan and Gujarat is still on the cards. “But our core focus is to remain more active online because we are getting almost 60,000-70,000 users per day online. So we are planning to target Tier-I cities online, and Tier-III cities with our offline stores,” he says.

Truly Indian

The .in domain of the Beyoung website aligns with the ‘Vocal for Local’ campaign and also helps them get good traction in Tier-II, III cities, feels Shivam. . “The .com domain is very globalised, but .in gives our consumers the guarantee of authenticity,” he says.

As Shivam mentions, the .in domain has helped several Indian brands make their mark in the online market. Apart from giving brands that Indian identity, the .in and .Bharat domain have also helped brands grow their business and cater to the Indian audience. Thanks to the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), these domains have been made easily available in 22 Indian languages. This initiative by NIXI has helped numerous indigenous brands in the country grow their business considerably.

Talking about the key growth drivers of Beyoung, Shivam says that the ‘Vocal for Local’ campaign and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated its growth. “Customers are slowly moving online, especially in Tier-I, II cities. They don’t have time to go to the market and shop anymore, so it has helped us a lot. We are also working to make our customers’ experience better,” he says.

Overcoming challenges

Talking about major roadblocks that most entrepreneurs face while starting a new venture, the young co-founder says that while financing can be managed, team-building is the biggest challenge. Shivam says that he and his core team ensured they built their team from scratch without any external help.

Talking about future plans, Shivam says, “We are planning to launch some experience stores as well as two or three experience products. In the next two to three years, we have a target of reaching the threshold of Rs 300 crore from sales.” He adds that the brand is planning to build some Augmented Reality (AR) functionalities on its website with the help of its tech team, apart from launching its app soon. “We are working hard on our tech. Recently, we also moved to a custom platform from Magento, so we are highly focused on the tech improvements for our brand,” he signs off.