Your Styl(e), Just a Few Clicks Away!
Styl, which was launched in 2015, is an amazing platform that lets you connect with your stylist even before you reach the salon. The successful startup Styl, founded by Anup Mohan and Srikanth Ch got acqui-hired by VOONIK. So as part of our Entrepreneurship project mentored by Sijo Kuruvilla George, we had this wonderful opportunity to interact with the co-founder of Styl, Anup Mohan. We really got a great exposure to various avenues of Styl that we share in our blog.
The Beginning-
It all began with Anup identifying the problem of Stylist lacking a concrete platform to communicate their creativity to the customers. Precisely, Styl is the LinkedIn for the stylists. Instead of going and wasting your time waiting in the salon, you can just lock your stylist through Styl and then enter the salon, and the stylist waits for you! Well Anup mentioned that since it was a niche idea, initially it did take efforts to convince the business. Anup mentioned it wasn’t too difficult for him to convince the stylists and the customers. Because, on one side, where stylists were looking for a platform to unveil their talent, the customers on the other hand wanted a less time consuming experience with appointments and getting work done. Since it was a niche idea, convincing the salon took a little effort as they preferred working offline, but Styl managed to convince well.
What differentiates Styl?
One main thing which makes Styl different from apps like Nearbuy and Little, is that Styl’s basic idea was based on building up a LinkedIn kind of platform for the stylists. A platform where stylists can share theirs or any other important work and consumers can know and be a part of the new trends in the fashion world. Styl is able to let out the creativity of the stylists to all. Where apps like Nearbuy and Little deal with “deals” and “offers”, Styl manages to capture the creativity and knowledge element. And never again one has to compromise on skills.
Their Sail-
When asked about the challenges he faced within the team, Anup could not recall of anything but the heat of Koramangala:D . But he did mention that he always managed to keep the business transparent among them and the team stayed united in terms of any issues or problems faced and worked together for Styl’s growth.
The USP of Styl-
Anup summed up the USP of STYL as “design and team”, never did they compromise on the quality of the product. The entire team kept to this.
Revenue Sourcing-
Styl had 3 revenue models and it earned its revenue through by way of charging a flat convenience fee from end users and a commission from salons for booking. It also offered salons a premium model to access analytics.
How much they value their Customers?
This is the welcome mail that Styl sends to its new customers to welcome them, makes the customer feel more important. This is how you really convert customers to loyal user! And this is not it, Styl does closely care about customer who leave
This gives them apt information on what to improve and the customers do feel like returning because of the personal interest shown by the customer. This facilitates improving the MVP too!
What pulled Voonik to Styl?
Voonik mainly acquired Styl for building up Vilara, Voonik was doing many acqui-hires at that point of time( Zohraa,Picksilk,etc and Styl being one of them),because it wanted to establish itself in the fashion e-commerce market and compete with Flipkart,Myntra and Jabong, which stands together as one player in the market. Voonik wanted to build Vilara from scratch and since they didn’t have the comfort of time with them, Voonik looked forward to these acqui-hires. Voonik wanted a strong tech team and people who would stick for a longer period and for Styl it wasn’t difficult to incorporate their ideas, innovation and work ethics into Vilara. Within 6–7 months period, Vilara came into existence and did quite well in the market. It took a little less than 3 months to develop Vilara.com (Android, iOs, Web & WAP). Styl joined Voonik in mid Feb 2016 and in May 2016, Vilara was launched. Comments of Sujayath “Styl team gave the immediate impetus to the Vilara App development. We got to market with both web and app within a record time.” Right now, the team of Styl, who is now a part of Voonik of course, is trying to build a stronger and a more durable platform for Voonik and its businesses.
Why Styl accepted the proposal of Acqui — Hire?
Anup stated the acceptance on the grounds of better revenue and also the fact that the next levels of finding ain’t that easy so overall the deal was a benefit. And another major reason being that the vision of Voonik and Styl matched.
The Acqui — Hire Stage -
“The overall experience was pretty good”, Anup says. In fact in the first meeting it between the two companies, 90 percent of the deal was completed. The founders of Voonik, Sujayath and Navaneetha, pretty much studied about Styl and the team of Styl just showcased what they did in terms of product, marketing, operation models and the hacks. Styl also found it easy to merge with Voonik because both the companies shared the same set of visions and work ethics. And it didn’t take more than 2 days to close the deal and within another 2 weeks’ time, the paperwork and rest got completed smoothly. What came as great relief to Anup is that all the team members got hired by Voonik and the team never had to split up even after getting acquired.
Post Acqui — Hire-
Anup mentions there has been quite a few unlearning after the acquisition. Not only the acquisition gave a new mileage to their work but also the team of Styl learnt that one must do away with Vanity Metrics because of the manipulations which can be done with them and one major takeaway which Anup mentioned is that he himself along with his team learnt to give more importance to numbers rather than stories because at the end of the day, numbers is what matters rather than a plain story. Another major unlearning for them was to believe in one’s own business and to do everything possible to sustain it. There were some operational changes though, Post acquihire they had to stop the entire operations at Styl .Also, as per the agreements, they had to pull back the domain, shut down the app & related services .That is why you can’t see the app online!
Now coming to our experience of interacting with one of the “cool” minds of the country, it was a noteworthy encounter. All of us coming from different backgrounds and few of us who never gave a serious thought on Entrepreneurship and startups, got to interact and collaborate with a proficient founder, means a lot to us and apart from learning about the technicalities of this acqui-hire, one life lesson which we all would forever embrace within our hearts is that one must learn to hold the relationships and to build any business or achieve something, it is important to respect each other’s values and to keep trying build teams of stability, trust and honesty throughout our lives.
