How many times have you gone for shopping only to return confused or not satisfied with your purchases? Or the chic black dress you ordered online just wasn’t the right fit? Fret not. Soon you can check out the selected merchandise and see how it looks on you even without physically visiting the city malls or showrooms and also chat with a team of stylists and designers to see what suits you best.
A team of three young engineering graduates – Shiva Karan, Ch. Yeshwanth and B. Bhaskar – has come up with a city-based startup called AcroMarc to address this dilemma of shoppers.
So, what did they do? Simple: They rolled out a virtual trial room to enable its buyers to check out how the select merchandise from various city stores looked on them via a styling engine.
They started the work on creating an exclusive interactive e-commerce platform last year in October.
Their plan is to not only create an online portal with a ‘styling room’, but the venture also intends to connect with all the retail stores in the city and help them reach out to customers through the ecommerce route within a three hours product delivery time.
Currently, AcroMarc is being incubated at the Sunrise Startup Village and is expected to go live in August. “We finished the market validation by December last year and have reached out to more than 20 city stores.
Most of them have shown interest. Right now we are in the prototyping stage and we hope to release the beta version by the end of this month to get feedback from select users before we go live in August,” says Shiva Karan, one of the co-founders.
The city-based online platform, AcorMarc gets people to view products from stores across the city.
“Once a user intends to buy any product, he/she can see how it looks on him/her on a ‘Memodel’ online, which we call as the ‘styling room’, by providing a few parameters like height, weight and skin-tone. We also provide users with a facility to share the image among friends and get reviews on an exclusive social networking platform that is part of AcroMarc,” says Ch. Yeshwanth.
At present, the team is looking to raise funds through venture capital firms or angel investors. “We have pitched before many investors through Sunrise Village and intend to raise Rs 1 to 2 crore for initial investments that would hold us strong for a year to begin with,” the team says. They intend to scale up the business to two-three more cities, once the Vizag venture gets rolling.
A separate team of four people, including two interns, are developing the website. The ‘styling engine’ - the USP of the product - is designed in such a way that it scans through a whole range of products and suggests what looks stylish on the individual, almost like a personal shopper.
Thankfully in this case, you won’t have to spend whopping bills to hire personal shoppers to look good! The team of AcroMarc has made a large database for the styling engine by pooling inputs from more than 2,000 websites. The portal will also have its own social networking segment where users can interact with each other and blog on fashion.
A separate section on stylists and designers will also be added to get tips on fashion trends.
The team will have its own logistics team that will ensure door delivery within the city in three hours time.
Once the traction picks up, the team will reach out to bigger logistics players.
