Men's fashion portal Fetise to shut shop

Men’s fashion apparels e-shop, Fetise.com, owned and operated by Delhi-based Fetise Retail is set to shut down

owing to corporate governance issues. It may be recalled that one of the four co-founders Abhishek Shah had put in his papers early last year and the other three, Somya Tambi, Vivek Shah and Chetan Bafna have also quit.

Sources say that Seedfund, which was supposed to invest five million dollars (over Rs 3,000 crores) in the venture two years ago, however it had written off its investment. The company is also facing forensic audit over some corporate governance issues. The official announcement is yet to come and the platform is still up and running.

Launched in March 2011, Fetise sells men’s fashion apparels, including flip flops, shirts, T-shirts, fragrances, moccasins, sunglasses, belts and head wraps. It also provides information on global fashion trends, style tips and all the fashion events happening in various cities. Beginning its operations as a sales event site offering sales that lasted from a few hours to a few days, letting customers buy a product of their choice. Later it changed the business format to become a generic fashion products e-tailer.

While the Indian e-commerce sector is on the rise with investors keen on investing in fashion portals, in the other hand, many start-ups who failed to manage the business and expanded too fast have failed to last more than a couple of years. A few examples of such casualties include: toy-store Wopshop, babycare e-tailer Hushbabies and Babyoye acquired Hoopos and later shut it down. Even leading e-tailer Flipkart had acquired and shut down LetsBuy and Myntra bought and closed SherSingh as a separate property, while retaining it as a private label. Other examples include Koolkart, Rock.in and MiraiStore and Timtara, who shut shop due to lack of funding and other issues.