Lifestyle portal Bewakoof looks at making 100 crores in FY17

Mumbai-based e-commerce site Bewakoof.com is expecting to grow from Rs 30 crores in 2015-16 to Rs 100 crores in FY17. The aim is to become India’s largest online fashion and lifestyle portal.

The portal was started in February 2012 by former IIT-B student Prabhkiran Singh and Siddharth Munot. It was intended to be a medium to share fun-loving youthful stuff with their networked friends but it soon grew into a business, a single-brand firm which made and marketed its own stuff targeting the youth. The start-up received an angel investment from Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl. Bewakoof takes care of all aspects of retail – from designing, merchandising, warehousing to marketing. The portal has 3,000 style trends, two million followers on social media and merchandise from 10 Bollywood movies. The firm focuses on Tier II and III cities.

Bewakoof has launched an affordable, trendy and stylish category for the women. This category will cater solely to the women segment and hopefully increase its sales revenue by 40 per cent. Singh zeroed in on the unusual name, which means ‘idiot’, because it immediately attracts attention and has a brand recall. As he says, he always wanted ‘to do something different and be an unconventional entrepreneur’. In fact, in his third year at IIT-B, he opened a kiosk outside the campus to sell naturally-flavoured ice-cream laced Punjabi lassi. He opened another kiosk and managed to sell 80-100 lassis a day but things soon took a different turn when his sales plunged. Within eight months of starting, he had to shut shop. It was after this, that he came up with the idea for Bewakoof.