Baggout: Where Fashion Meets Technology

The Story of Anu and Deepk Jain is not a normal story even though they both have lived in a non-descript place called Trinagar in Western Delhi since childhood. Deepak completed his MBA from IIM Ahmedabad after completing his Engineering from IIT Roorkee while Anu completed her Bachelors in Architecture from Manipal University. Both belong to traditional Jain families and got married after one meeting of 15 minutes. But, both of them knew that it was the Right match within those 15 minutes. It is this kind of confidence in their gut feeling that allowed them to leave their cushy jobs to start a Fashion Portal – Baggout.com after they faced issues while buying fashion online.

The duo has been running the portal for over three years now and have gone through the ups and downs of business including raising an angel round from some marquee angels such as Sumit Jain (Ex CTO Jabong), Sumit Jain (CEO – CommonFloor) and Anurag Gupta (MD – DGM India) and not getting additional committed funding from a prominent Angel Network after the news of down-rounds started coming out in e-commerce.

But one thing that has happened through all this time is that their portal has kept on improving as they have gleaned strong insights on Indian Fashion e-commerce’s problems and solved them through proprietary Technology. Their experiments on Baggout have resulted in driving 50,000+ orders to their partner retailers. They clearly understand that users need some great value proposition to buy online Fashion at Full Price but most of Indian players have not been able to provide that and have resorted to deep discounting to acquire users. Innovation on product side is clearly lacking in the whole ecosystem.

The duo was perfectly happy in growing Baggout but then their partner retailers started approaching them. These interactions with the retailers and close understanding of their pain points helped the duo understand that they can easily help fashion brands in driving traffic to their website and improve conversions through smart recommendations powered by proprietary algorithms.

Their flagship product till date is creating a look for every product in retailer’s inventory which is a first in India and is already being piloted with two of the largest Fashion Brands in India. However, the duo feels that the biggest problem faced by Offline Fashion Brands when they come online is that they are not able to drive visibility. The company helps these brands in driving both Search and Social Traffic through their Automated algorithms. The best thing about these methodologies, the duo says, is that it’s all automated and has passed the test of time on Baggout (driving 500K Monthly visits).

The duo feels that there is a lot of innovation needed before there is a mass adoption of online fashion buying in India. It will take a number of companies like Baggout to create the right ecosystem which would enable Online Fashion to become mainstream. The offline brands are not capable of developing these breakthrough technologies and would need an outside help for scaling up their business online. It is still early days of Indian Online Fashion industry and the funding plug has indeed made the companies to look inside and see the kind of innovations that they are driving rather than just throwing money to acquire users.

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