Yeh eloelo kya hai, yeh eloelo?
The Indian Beauty and Personal Care (BPC) is estimated to be ~$20Bn in market size and growing at a 9% CAGR to touch ~$23 Bn by 2022. Specialised categories like cosmetics, fragrance, men’s grooming and skin care are set to outpace the growth of generic categories and are expected to hold ~40–45% of the overall market share by 2022. Generic categories like bath & shower, hair care and oral care already enjoy a higher penetration (read presence of behemoths like HUL, P&G etc) and are mature categories because of which they will demonstrate slower growth. There are interesting sub/adjacent categories like Herbal, Nutrition, Healthy Foods, Vitamins & Supplements, Fitness etc. which are seeing high growth rates, greater adoption and increasing AOV’s.
Industry is undergoing a dramatic shift due to the advent of digitally native brands and technology adoption
While online still only contributes 3–5% of the total sales in this segment, it is growing rapidly with horizontal platforms like Amazon, giving a stiff fight to vertical players like Nykaa, Purplle. Yet, India has a long way to go before the BPC category starts to gain meaningful online channel sales. This implies that there is massive headroom for innovative online players to grow and scale with a differentiated offering and value proposition. Case in point, the BPC segment online share in the US is predicted to surge to 48% by 2023.
India is seeing a plethora of brands — existing offline, digitally native and D2C all offering differentiated products, packaging, marketing with a significantly greater use of technology
However, these long tail of good brands suffer from a key problem — Discovery
- “Gold” Weightage-Large Brands dominate Rankings (~65% Share Online)
- Super vertical players largely focussed on large brands / private labels
- Too many smaller brands vying for user’s mind space and wallet share
On the other hand, India’s next 200–300M internet users/millennials are increasingly aspirational and want to look and feel good, however they are value conscious and seek recommendations about products from people they know and trust
- Influencer created short form video content to discover products, create trust and provide product recommendations
- What to buy and where to buy; strong inclination to be part of a community
- Seek a trusted platform to purchase their favourite products, hunt for deals, offers, group buy features etc.
While Kay by Katrina is a tremendously aspirational brand, most Tier 2 women you speak to will tell you, “Katrina pe toh har cheez achi lagegi” (“Anything will look good on Katrina”). To gain trust, the influencer has to be more relatable who can also share tips, answer queries, provide product reviews etc.
eloelo — Social Commerce for Health, Beauty & Wellness
eloelo is a Beauty, Health & Wellness content, community and commerce platform that offers curated short videos by influencers combined with a thriving community (both online and offline) to ask questions and get answers by experts. eloelo aims to empower the Bharat millennial user to Look Good, Feel Good and make the right choices.
3Cs: Content <> Community <> Commerce: “We believe that a Content first approach is the future for categories like Lifestyle & Wellness.” Covid has not only given massive tail winds to the BPC segment, it has also made immersive digital experiences the need of the hour
- Users can personalise their interests across Skin Care, Beauty, Hair, Men’s Grooming etc, consume hundreds of short 60-sec videos from several influencers.
- A vibrant community allows users to ask questions and queries, get answers from experts and create a strong sense of community.
- Content and community, clubbed with an ever growing follower base across platforms such as Instagram, @Facebook, @Whatsapp etc should bring down CAC’s while commerce and gamification would create high quality digital experiences, significantly increase retention/LTV to drive commerce.
The BPC category has further nuances —High repeat, Strong subscription use case, Low Returns, High GM% (25%-30%) and focus on discovery long tail of high quality brands. The Content & Community vectors can be tailor made for a high involvement, personalised, trusted, high engagement driven Commerce platform.
The Founding Team
We @Waterbridge Ventures look for strong founder-market fit and Akshay and Saurabh fit the mould perfectly for what they are building at eloelo. They both met at Flipkart and have known each other for several years. While Saurabh is an MBA from JBIMS and was a category manager at Flipkart with stints at P&G, L’Oreal etc, Akshay is an alumnus of @IIT Kharagpur and cut his teeth in supply chain and ops at Flipkart. Saurabh brings in very strong brand, partnerships, category management and P&L expertise while Akshay brings in the required chops in ops, supply chain etc.
Since their launch less than 2 weeks ago, the app has has been downloaded more than 20K times (80% from non metro cities), Top 20 in Playstore’s Lifestyle category, amassed over 60K followers across platforms and seen ~700K actions on the platform right from watching videos, posting questions to claiming elo-coins.
@WaterBridge Ventures has partnered with the eloelo team as its first institutional investor along with several angels and we are very excited to be a part of this journey.
Press Coverage: https://www.vccircle.com/waterbridge-leads-funding-for-social-commerce-firm-floated-by-former-flipkart-execs
#VC #SocialCommerce #beauty #ecommerce
