HushBabies buys kidswear etailer MangoStreet

IndoUS Venture Partners-backed Lapis Marketing Services, promoter of baby products ecommerce site HushBabies, has acquired Delhi-based online branded kids apparel store MangoStreet (the site is currently not active). The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed. MangoStreet’s founders, brothers Mohit and Rahul Yadav, will join the HushBabies management team, said a press release issued today. Incidentally, MangoStreet’s founders have been in the market to raise a $5 million Series A round since January.

While the press release on the deal claims that MangoStreet was founded four years ago, the statement is a bit misleading. The brand came into being just last December and was the result of a business recast undertaken by Scopial Fashions, the holding company for MangoStreet (the Scopial Fashions website is also currently not live). Scopial Fashions was started in 2008 in Mumbai by the Yadav brothers as an online tee-shirt design and ecommerce company (the tee-shirts were retailed through Scopial.com). The company raised a seed round of funding from unnamed angel investors last October. Post-funding, the brothers decided to put the tee-shirt business on hold, move headquarters to Delhi and recast the business to focus on kidswear.

“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,” Rahul Yadav told StartupCentral in January. We could not reach him for comments on the acquisition by HushBabies. “Mohit and Rahul bring an excellent combination of entrepreneurial energy and operational expertise in this space,” HushBabies CEO Sridhar Seshadri said in the press release. Details on MangoStreet’s current scale of operations were not available, but when Yadav spoke to us last, he claimed 1,500 orders in January, of which 35 per cent were in the school uniforms category. It also had plans to launch a private label.

HushBabies is one among several infant products focused ecommerce sites that have found venture capital in recent months. Its peers or competitors include Pune-based FirstCry, backed by SAIF Partners and IDG Venture India, Mumbai-based BabyOye, which has been funded by Accel Partners and Tiger Global, and Bangalore-based Hoopos, which has raised funds from Helion Venture Partners. HushBabies raised an undisclosed amount in Series A round of funding from IndoUS Venture Partners in June. This followed a seed round, amount undisclosed, raised from Nexus Venture Partners and IndoUS. Nexus, reportedly, exited the company at the time of the Series A round. The company offers more than 10,000 products online and claims more than 1,000 customer orders per day.

Image courtesy: HushBabies and MangoStreet