Today we are going to discuss the inspiring success story of a Reselling business called Bewakoof.com. They started with just 30K and now the Average Monthly Revenue is up to 20 Crore. It is one of India’s fastest growing eCommerce Start-up.
Now let us see their growth story,
The Beginning:
The eBusiness was launched on April 1, 2012, by Siddharth Munot and Prabhkiran Singh, who are IITians from Bombay. Before they started Bewakoof.com, Prabhkiran ran a business selling fresh flavored lassi called ‘khadkegLASSI’. Siddharth was working with an education start-up. They started together with a domain reselling business. They also use to sell Printed-T-shirts during the college festivals and they had a very good response.
The Idea:
The idea is to create a brand and take the T-shirt printing business online. Printing popular and trending movie dialogs and quotes on the T-shirts. This is a very simple and effective model. They targeted mainly youth in the age group of 16-34 years. Soon as they launched the brand, they have received a very good response and raised more than Rs. 80 Crore in funding. They were successful where giants like Amazon and Flipkart were struggling.
Business Model:
Trends will change very quickly and people always get attracted to the new trends and they like to purchase that which is trending. The model is very simple, bringing the latest trends into fashion. Bewakoof did this by bringing the popular and trending dialogues and quotes to Lifestyle and Fashion by printing them on the T-shirts.
They also sell mobile phone covers but t-shirts are their best sellers.
Their ‘Ghanta’ collection of t-shirts for college students with messages like ‘Ghanta Engineering/Ghanta MBA’ etc have been their best selling products.
They did their own customizations and manufacturing, which will reduce the cost of production.
Social Media Marketing:
It was a very good platform for them to create brand awareness, in fact, they have created a social media base before they start selling the products. They have created a meme page and posted memes continuously and shared trending memes and increased the social media base. Then they started product selling and launched their E-commerce business.
As their content was posted on social media, people started liking it. In just 3 months they received more than 75000 likes and following. They received most of the organic traffic for social media posts. They have a monthly website traffic volume of above 5 Lakhs, 10 lakhs Instagram followers, Social media base is more than 15 Lakhs. They do ship to more than 90 countries. They have more than 3000 t-shirt styles to offer the customers.
They are also the official merchandise partner with T-Series, Excel Entertainment, Viacom, etc.
Let us do the growth analysis of Bewakoof.com and try to learn more about their success. There are mainly 7 factors to determine the growth of Bewakoof.com
1. Brand Name
2. Use of Social Media
3. High Product Margin
4. First Mover Advantage
5. Social Commerce First
6. Trend
7. Zero Dead Stock
Let us discuss one by one in detail as a case study.
1. Brand Name:
Any brand or business name should be attractive. The word Bewakoof is a very popular word in India, the meaning of the word is ‘mindless’ or a ‘fool’. The idea is to make people remember the brand name, so it has to be unique and attractive.
2. Use of Social Media:
It is really motivating, how they ran Social Media Campaigns to promote the brand. Unlike other brands, they never post anything related to products, they always post memes, jokes and always come up with unique and engaging content that makes users connected. They get most of the traffic from Social Media platforms which allows them not to depend more on paid campaigns.
They print the T-shirts with the same memes that they posted on social media thus making their followers their customers.
3. High Product Margin:
They earn at least 50% to 100% on each T-shirt they produce. For example, it might take up to Rs. 100 to Rs. 120 to make a T-shirt. They sell it up for Rs. 300 which is a 60% Profit margin. Most of the resellers put their margin low like up to 20% which is why there will be no consistency in their business and cannot sustain in the long term.
4. First Mover Advantage:
There was no customized T-shirt printing start-up in India when Bewakoof started their business. Here we are not talking about traditional T-shirt printing businesses but a start-up that can take the idea further and sell the customized printed T-shirts online that are unique and popular trends and also continuously being up-to-date with the new trends.
5. Social Commerce First:
Bewakoof started their business with social commerce and shifted to eCommerce. It is a very smart move from them because initially, they didn’t launch their E-commerce website as it involves a lot of capital to design, develop, marketing and promotions. So, instead, they started selling the products on WhatsApp and later shifted to E-commerce. They are now planning to shift again to Social Commerce.
6. Trend:
They always change according to the Trends. The strategy here is they produce as per the demand. They manufacture only after they receive the order. They design a T-shirt with a trendy quote and upload the image into the website, once they receive the order, they will manufacture and deliver it to the customer. In this way, they make sure that there is a Zero Dead Stock
7. Zero Dead Stock:
They always work on livestock as they manufacture and deliver on-demand, they have a Zero Dead Stock.
Future Plan
In a recent interview, the founders of Bewakoof, Siddharth Munot, and Prabhkiran Singh have informed that they are making 15% on their sales through WhatsApp and Messenger and they want to increase this to 25%. They started from Social Commerce, shifted to E-commerce and they are again targeting Social Commerce to increase the sales. This shows the importance of Social Commerce.
