An offline discovery led to the formation of Stylecaret

An offline discovery led to an innovative business idea – the formation of Stylecaret!

Who does not love online shopping?

The founder of the famous website Stylecaret, Neekee Singh, really did – even from her earlier days while spending her time looking for great online deals. A Mumbaikar by heart and soul, she always knew that some of the best deals came from online shopping, as they offered her the best discounts – but that all changed one day, when she discovered that it was not necessarily true.

You see, Stylecaret aims to become a shopping website that offers beautiful fashion pieces at an affordable price, unlike the case with most online fashion websites. She always loved the idea of shopping for clothes at discounted rates, but an excursion one day to the Surat and Jaipur markets to shop for some wedding clothes led her to discover that online retailers usually sell their products at high prices.

The reason behind this is due to the differences she noticed between the online prices she always saw and the offline prices she was now seeing. This obviously came as a major surprise, because she always assumed that online clothes were cheaper especially on discounts, and that is not hard to believe considering the spread of the internet everywhere.

This discovery led her to conduct more research on what she saw, and she spent the next several weeks visiting different markets and seeing what they had to offer, as well as trying to find out what led to these differences. She also forged some good relationships with the local traders and asked them about how they did their pricing, as well as discussing price gaps with them.

Her research led her to the conclusion that many online retailers, especially the big ones, usually charge a margin of between 20 to 30 percent on every item they sell. This eventually results in the products becoming more expensive for the customer, even if you happen to buy them in bulk – and also keeping in mind that these retailers purchase these products at lower costs because they are buying them in bulk.

It led her to form her first online retail store dealing in fashion, but offering customers products at their actual price instead of adding margins. The only cost they charge is the processing fee, and that comes to a standard fee of Rs.49.

Thanks to Shrutika Potwar