Two students from National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) Praween KR and Sindhuja K set up a bootstrap named Young Trendz to target fashion-conscious 20-somethings. The brand managed to sell 25,000 units on Flipkart in 5 days during the festive sale in 2017.
Praween KR (from Bihar) and Sindhuja K (from Hyderabad) were students when this startup idea hit them. In their seventh semester of the knitwear design bachelor’s course at NIFT, Chennai, both of them decided to do something of their own, on their own.
The trend of e-commerce started gearing up in the market in 2015 and is still at its peak. So that is when they thought of going with the flow and they started their own clothing brand, Young Trendz, in September. To begin with, they made an initial investment of ₹ 10 lakh. Within two months their products were online on famous online shopping stores like Amazon, Flipkart, Voonik and Paytm and after some time, they finally launched their own e-commerce website for direct marketing of their products.
Young Trendz targets mostly college goers. The startup picked up growth rapidly and before the end of the semester they were participating in college events with freebies and providing customized t-shirts under their own brand (Young Trendz).
They started with 10 orders a day on their website and by the end of the 8th semester, they were supplying customized t-shirts by collaborating with more than hundred colleges across the country, including IITs and IIMs. Now the startup is doing pretty well and it is getting around thousand orders a day, generating an impressive Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) of ₹ 20 crore with almost zero venture capital funds in it.
The journey from Chennai to Tiruppur
As Young Trendz was blooming pretty well, they thought of having a seamless product development channel. As Tiruppur is the knitwear and manufacturing hub of India, it was only possible in Tiruppur.
The founders of the Young Trendz were confident about the shift as they knew they could source and manufacture quality products for college projects if they shift to Tiruppur.
As Praween and Sindhuja were not Tamil speakers, they faced a few problems in the initial days. Still, the Tiruppur shift proved to be beneficial in terms of product development and sourcing of raw materials. In Tiruppur, they got the right people with excellent skills in the garment industry for product development. They got talented IT professionals from Coimbatore for their online web operations. Logistics did not prove to be an issue for them because they got they got their shipments picked up by the local courier partners of the respective marketplaces
Young Trendz is catering to a large audience and as the name suggests, Young Trendz is about young people and trending designs. Hence they got a perfectly related tagline: Stay Young, Live Trendy. The brand basically targets youth in the age group of 18-28 years. Their products feature quirky graphics as it resonates with the youth. To get inspiration for graphics, they monitor and follow trending things on social media and day-to-day life. The brand is competing with almost 1.5 lakh competitors to be on the first page of online marketplaces.
Young Trendz has a team of thirty people and now the brand has its warehouses in Telangana, Karnataka, Haryana, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu. It is going to open one in West Bengal soon. These warehouses help the startup to cater to customers all across India. They get the highest demand from Delhi, followed by north-eastern states and West Bengal. 90% of their shipments are delivered to the customers before the promised date.
The concept of couple clothing which is quite popular in Chinese and Korean markets was first brought to India by Young Trendz. In 2016 in the season of Valentines’ Day, it did an experiment by selling limited stocks and it got a great response. The amazing response from customers encouraged the Young Trendz to do further additions and couple clothing accounts for 20 percent of the sales today.
Their Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is their graphics, implementation of international trends, and quick delivery. Young Trendz works with three designers and outsources its photo shoots and ad campaign shoots.
Sindhuja K claims that the quality of Young Trendz quality is unmatched and the price range (between ₹ 250 and ₹ 600) suits to the pocket college students. The brand appeals to a large audience and now they have more than 3,500 products uploaded across all the e-commerce marketplaces. They generate 70% of their revenue from e-commerce. They refresh and update their collections twice a month and the team keeps its social media followers updated with the exciting offers and discounts.
Young Trendz was awarded as one of the top brands in the terms of performance during the Big Billion Days of 2017. It got a great response in the festive season that it managed to sell 25000 units in merely five days.
The brand is going to open offline stores soon and add new categories to its collection. It has no plans to raise funds as they want to continue bootstrapped. It is confident and positive about its profits in future.
Sindhuja accepted that there is more responsibility involved in starting a business in place of having a regular job as you need to go for perfection and you have to adapt to crazy and unexpected things. The team try its best to perform well.
Both Sindhuja and Praween are from a non-business background so they had to learn a lot of new tricks for the trade. They read class XII accountancy books, learned a new language Tamil and made efforts to understand taxes. Their hard work is paying them back well as this year they reached a turnover of ₹ 20 Crore in 2017, which is four times of the turnover in 2016.
With great techniques and efforts, Young Trendz seems to set for a bright future.