The online fashion marketplace is here to provide a fillip to unbranded fashion

Voonik.com, (both website and app) was founded with an idea to be a fashion marketplace for women looking for their everyday wear. As it’s labelled as the country’s first personalised shopping app, you’re curious about what it means in this context? “Voonik takes the skin tone, body type and preferences into consideration to see if the fit suits you. We’ve developed a 10000-rule algorithm in coordination with our stylists to assist users,” the founder Sujayath Ali states.

Finalising the criteria was a tough ask, but they’d readied them from a generalised questionnaire of over 150 questions in discussion with stylists that women consider as they shop.

For now, its users are shown a series of celebrities with whom they can compare their body, tone and other preferences. Isn’t that objectification of sorts? “As it was a new idea, we needed a way out to familiarise our user-base. It’ll have an adequate replacement in the coming days,” elaborates Ali.

Voonik respects the fact that not everyone needs to be a fashionista for buying clothes online. “There are so many shopping sites that promote branded fashion but we’re here to show how potent unbranded fashion can also be. We didn’t want to sophisticate things and are clear of catering to the masses,” Ali elaborates. He justifies this saying, most women are focussed on the place and quality where a fabric comes from, than the brand altogether. It looks like their focused strategy has indeed paid off with nearly 6 million app installations in its 18-month run.

Beyond user needs, Voonik’s uniqueness shows up in their ‘Become a seller’ section. They have a one-of-a-kind image recognition platform that’ll help the management assess the quality of the fabric once sellers upload the images of the stock. That has helped them build a vast collection of 15-lakh clothing, the most for an online fashion outlet to date, globally.

They have interesting plans lined up for the times to come. Having just acquired a menswear shopping portal Getsty, they’re on the path to integrate men’s collection to their platform, which users can access through another exclusive app. There are two other acquisitions they remain tightlipped about, but with persistence, we get hints. “There’ll be a premium luxury section that’ll be launched too,” Sujayath manages to say.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus / by Srivathsan Nadadhur /Hyderabad – March 07th, 2016