PushInterview 11:
How Vedang and team built The Souled Store- An online store generating $450k+ per month staying bootstrapped
The journey of how Vedang and team built The Souled Store- An online store generating $450k+ per month staying bootstrapped.
India’s online fashion market is expected to grow four-fold to $30 billion by 2020.
There are tons of companies being born every day to cater to this growing demand. You can also see brands setting up their own e-commerce store and using marketplaces like Flipkart or Amazon to have an online presence.
Is it possible for any startup to remain bootstrapped and differentiate in this crowded market? If yes, how?
Read through this interview to know the answer.
This is the eleventh interview of the series “PushInterview: Interviews that help you Pushstart” powered by Pushstart.
Check out our previous interview on “How I built one of the most active startup communities of India” if you happened to miss it.
🕴 Who are you?
Hey Pushstarters! I am Vedang Patel, co-founder and executive director of The Souled Store.
I did my graduation in mechanical engineering from Sardar Patel College of Engineering. Being an automobile enthusiast, I took part in many national level competitions which revolved around making cars.
After passing out, I worked as a financial analyst for two years, and that’s when I met the other two co-founders of The Souled Store.
I cleared CAT and got admission calls from three IIMs.
It was just after admission that I realized that life was getting monotonous and I stopped enjoying the world of finance overall. This was when my entrepreneurial journey began.
🤔 What’s the deal with The Souled Store?
The Souled Store is an e-commerce website that sells the most insane merchandise along themes like pop culture, TV shows, superheroes, music, sports etc.
We create and curate stunning designs and print them on all sorts of equally stunning products- from t-shirts to phone covers to backpacks to boxers to really long boxers and many, many more!
Our products are designed specifically to spread happiness, right down to the bottom of your ‘soul’.
The Souled Store was born out of the idea of loving what you do — “Following your soul.”
You can visit the website and discover a wide range of products categorized according to your favorite theme, artist, and genre.
T-shirts are our core product comprising of almost half our sales.
💯 What motivated you to start The Souled Store and how did you validate your idea?
When I was pursuing finance, I realized that I wasn’t really enjoying my job.
I did not like to go to my office, and I hated Mondays. I soon realized that there are too many Mondays in life to keep on hating.
I was craving to do something which I would continue love doing for the next 30–40 years.
I was fond of star wars and pop culture in general and would always look for their official fan merchandise. But, back in 2014, these items were either available at high price or as a fake.
A simple t-shirt would cost around Rs. 1800.
These items were costly as they were shipped abroad for the required prints and watermarks, and then shipped back to India.
Thus me and my co-founders thought of solving this inefficiency and came up with the idea of selling licensed merchandise in India at much cheaper rates than they were available.
The idea validation took some time or to be precise; it took a few months.
We pooled in money and spent Rs. 25k to get the website done by a service company. It was a basic e-commerce website, and once it was up, we sold around 100 t-shirts within the first week.
The reviews and responses of our first 100 customers helped us in validating the idea.
🛠 What all went into building the initial product?
When we decided to start The Souled Store, all three of us pooled in Rs. 175k each for the company and Rs 25k each for daily expenses.
It was all the money that we had saved during our job as financial analysts. We started from the cabin of a friend’s office. We had just one room and a cupboard where we stacked our first lot of t-shirts.
Initially we had no clue of designing or coding. We were just young minds with ideas.
We spent Rs. 25k to get our basic e-commerce website done by a service company and I learned graphic designing in a day. We did all the work from designing t-shirts to taking calls from customers.
We outsourced the manufacturing part as it was a capital-intensive job which we couldn’t afford at the initial stage.
T-shirts were the first lot of products which got sold through our website.
🤝 How did you get your initial buyers?
We sold around 100 t-shirts to our friends and family members in the first week of launching our website. But the growth after that was pretty slow.
I remember, we came down to just 5 t-shirts in the second week and 10 in the next.
This was the time when we started doing ads on FB, Instagram and Google and improved SEO of our website to gain visibility.
We also consistently posted content on our social media handles around trending topics that our audience could relate to.
As our products were always in line with the trend, we got good conversion through content marketing.
We also did a lot of engaging contests and competitions to grow our following on Instagram and FB.
One of the many contests that we ran:
We spread awareness about our brand in a few offline events like The Lil Flea too.
Apart from this, we also ran online internship programs for students to penetrate The Souled Store inside colleges.
These programs were not made for the sole purpose of hiring interns but to help us reach the students who would love our products.
The big break came when we collaborated with famous artists and made official merchandise for them. We have worked with AIB, Kenny Sebastian, Kanan Gill and many others till now.
Influencer marketing is a powerful tool. Use it right, and you can grow like anything.
💰 What is your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
Our basic business model is all about being different from other similar products in the market.
A few strategies which have helped us grow our revenue:
- We have to secure licenses for selling certain merchandises. We guarantee to make the merchandise catchy and more wearable and thus acquire the licenses for cheap.
- We design around the theme which is trending. Every logo or quote or character is placed on the product with a lot of passion.
We cover almost everything which is trending.
- We monitor the conversion rates on our website and the ads to check the performance of a particular design. Accordingly, we optimize our designs to give people what they want.
- Our efforts of making The Souled Store as a one-stop solution for getting all fan merchandise has helped us grow our revenues.
- Our other strategy is, focusing on the Indian content. This is visible in our recent collaborations with AIB, Kenny Sebastian, and Kolkata Knight Riders. People love to wear merchandise of celebrities they follow.
Bollywood merchandise is also a big hit, and we are growing with them.
The Souled Store is profitable and clocking 3 crore monthly recurring revenue.
🏁 What are your future goals and how do you plan to achieve them?
We aim to make The Souled Store a one-stop destination for everything that is quirky, trendy and related to pop-culture. We also look forward to moving over to more of Indian content like Indian shows, musicians, and artists.
Our last step would be going offline and having stores across various cities in India!
We don’t have any particular strategy in mind as of now for the same but we are constantly making progress in terms of expanding our product range, collaborations and increasing the domain of topics around which we design.
These will take us ahead and help us achieve our goals somewhere down the line.
🌋 The biggest challenges you have faced till now and how did you cope with them?
Acquiring licenses is a big challenge as we need to purchase them at the right price and also ensure that they are not fake.
It still happens that we give months to acquire a particular license and sometimes, it just doesn’t come through. This is always a big blow for us but we keep trying and never give up.
Also, onboarding any company for selling their official merchandise takes time.
It took us a year of consistent effort to onboard AIB.
There is also the constant challenge of being up to date with all the latest trends.
Apart from this, securing government licenses for doing business online is not easy due to corruption(bribery) that is involved. All the accounting processes like filing income tax returns, GST management, and compliances are a tough task to manage, and they come as a challenge for us every time.
🗒 What is your advice to Pushstarters starting out?
- Choosing the right partners is essential. Your partner may not have the same thinking process as you do but he must question all the decisions that you take so that it leads to better outcome.
You need to have all different kinds of views on the table.
- You need to have determination and motivation. Remember that you would face failures, but you need to keep on trying hard till the time you achieve what you want.
Thanks a lot for reading! If you liked it, please support by clapping 👏🏻 and sharing the post. Feel free to leave a comment 💬 below.
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Hey! Neeraj here, the founder of Pushstart, India’s most active entrepreneur community. I release interviews with successful entrepreneurs every week. Feel free to reach out to me on Facebook | Linkedin | neeraj.joshi@pushstart.in | Twitter.
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