Are ladies blushing online?

Being a decade that has broken a lot of myths about Indian buyers especially the one’s online, 2012 has a lot big plans in-store for its digital buyers. And cashing on this major change in the market is the startup, Ladyblush that claims to be India’s 1^st women-only shopping website. “Our intent has been on creating a shopping destination for women and offering rich assortment of products across categories for their consumption,” says Suneet Manchanda, COO, LadyBlush.com

While their typical customer is predominantly a young, self-reliant, fashion conscious woman, as they call it, (thanks to the increasing internet penetration in India – currently 10.2%) interestingly a small percentage of men are also buying from Ladyblush for women in their lives and come from smaller towns as well. With a choice of having nothing for 65% of the Indian internet users – men, the website went live in February 2012. “We are different from all the players in the industry who sell fashion to phones, we do not. Our focus is only on fashion and fashion accessories,” explains Suneet Manchanda speaking about their brand positioning. While Ladyblush focuses on quality, assortment and customer delight that would result in strong network effects, the market in fact points in the direction of pricing as the market driver with the increasing number of deals and coupon sites cropping up in India.

With a firm belief in referrals, viral and organic traffic, they have currently refrained from SEM on Google, Yahoo and Facebook. But it is likely that they would resort to SEM shortly for the market trends (recent Comscore study) show that 1 in every 3 users in Internet India is a woman. Of those women who are online in India 1 of 3 are on Facebook. What is going right for Ladyblush? The market segment that they target is probably one of the most influential groups of online shoppers in the world today. Another study (Microsoft Starcom Mediavest, May 2010 study) shows that Indian mothers actually spend 3X more time on the internet than on television. The same report also states that 63% of them search for self-related information – fashion, accessories essentially everything lifestyle.

It would be interesting to see if this company also cashes in on the increasing number of women in the mcommerce space. Entrepreneurs entering the ecommerce space may have read the pulse of the current consumer market but it would definitely be an interesting watch to see how ecommerce sites manage to adapt themselves on the mobile space to cater to this growing number of mcommerce buyers.

For information on Ladyblush, log on to their website.