Online tee-shirt design and ecommerce company Scopial Fashions has re-aligned its business model to focus on kidswear. The company, which has also relocated operations from Mumbai to Delhi, has just launched MangoStreet, an online store for branded kidswear and is also in the process launching its own private label. Scopial’s founders, brothers Rahul and Mohit Yadav, have raised an undisclosed seed round of funding from angel investors and are now in the market for a $5 million Series A round.
MangoStreet, says Rahul Yadav, went live on December 25 last year and expects to close January with at least 1,500 orders. About 35 per cent of orders at present are in the school uniforms category. “We hope to become official partners for 2,000 schools by the end of the year,” he says. The company has set up an 800 square feet warehouse in Delhi and has a tie-up with BlueDart for order deliveries. It offers free delivery to 4,000 pincodes, out of which 2,600 pincodes can avail of the cash-on-delivery payment option. It also has a 365-day returns policy.
The founders have kept their previous tee-shirt design business, which retailed through Scopial.com (launched in 2008), on hold for the time being. The decision to focus on kidswear followed the seed funding round in October last year. “We had raised the funds for Scopial but soon realized that kidswear was an under-penetrated and potentially huge market. We worked on the idea for 3-4 months and launched MangoStreet in December,” says Yadav. At the time, Scopial.com was averaging 30-40 sales per day online and was also retailing offline through tie-ups with large retail chains such as Shoppers’ Stop and Westside. With the launch of MangoStreet, the brothers, who are natives of Jaipur, also decided to shift base to Delhi, partly because they found the costs of running operations in Mumbai too high. Scopial Fashions is now the holding company for MangoStreet.
Over the next 12 months, MangoStreet aims to become a one-stop shop for branded kidswear online, going across categories from uniforms to accessories to footwear. The company’s eight-member team is also working on rolling out its own label soon, for which it will undertake design and manufacturing. It is yet to come up with a name for the label.
Image Courtesy: MangoStreet
