As the aspirations of the millennial crowd explore newer horizons, luxury products find their way sometimes in to unwelcome wardrobes, due to impulsive buying or peer pressure. Having spent a few good thousands or lakhs on them, discarding them would be heart-breaking. But there might well be another way, with a bunch of startups offering platforms where the user could sell off his/her luxury possessions.
Delhi-based Confidential Couture has seen a good number of sellers not just from metros, but even from smaller cities like Coimbatore, Ludhiana, Kanpur and Indore. “In a day we get about 30 queries from sellers. We start from Michael Kors and above and don’t accept anything lower,” said Anvita Mehra, founder of the company.
“We are facilitating access to international designers, if not first-hand, then second-hand. It’s like recycling luxury. You get the feel good factor of the luxury product at a discounted price,” she added.
The products, which are picked up from the sellers after being given an estimate price, go through a series of authentication and conditioning processes, and get listed on the website at discounts ranging from 30-90%.
“Initially, when we started off, we were doing five-six sales a week. Today we are doing nine-10 sales a day. We are looking at a 40-45% increase every month in the number of sales,” noted Mehra.
Dimple Mirchandani, founder of Delhi-based Secret Dresser, feels that the business model would not just help increase rotation inside the market, but would also “help the planet by reducing wastage and cutting down production by a bit.”
“When I launched the website, we had more sellers than buyers. We have even had repetitive sellers who have sent around five dresses within two months,” she said.
The products which are sold at 50-60% of the retail price mostly find buyers from the 18-30-years age group. Adhering to its name, the startup also tries to maintain secrecy regarding seller and buyer information. “You don’t want anybody to know it’s second-hand. So nobody will ever know who bought and who sold it,” Mirchandani said.
Chennai-based HiFlame14.com, which plans to roll out its luxury selling and buying feature in a couple of months, carried out a survey in collaboration with the students of National Institute of Fashion Technology to find out that 70% of most wardrobes remained unused.
Source: The Economic Times