The Online Tailoring Outfit Assures Timely Delivery of Personalized Fashion Clothes
How often do you come back from a tailoring shop empty – handed, because the tailor has not stuck to his timeline or that something was not correct according to the measurements you had given? Many of us; especially women members in the family, have experienced this situation many times.
No longer! Thanks to the technology and some enterprising minds who have found a permanent solution to this universal problem.
Hyderabad based husband-wife team of Rudra and Susmitha, having faced such a hardship many times, decided to do something about it. And, their backgrounds helped. Both engineers from BITS, Pilani and both IIM Calcutta Graduates saw a tremendous opportunity in this problem.
What they did next was something which came naturally to the entrepreneurial software engineers couple. Taking advantage of the pandemic and a stay – home time, they went about learning about the tailoring industry, its origins, stakeholders, difficulties, the supply chain, the existing rates, competition, market sizing and growth potential. About five days every week, they left their young kids with their parents and went to the wholesale fabric and boutique clusters in Hyderabad, met multiple boutiques and stylists and collected crucial information about the industry operations just to find a technology led solution to the problem. They further improvised on the possible mobile app screens, features, offline – online processes, budgets and software cloud hosting configurations.
They went on to form the worlds and India’s first Online Tailoring Solutions App called ‘Cloud Tailor’ in December 2020 amid the pandemic. This way the world’s first – ever, novel cloud – based and a ‘Low operational cost – high quality garments’ business model was born for ‘Hyper-Personalized’ digitized tailoring capable of seeking orders for womens wear from across the world. Addressing a $4 Billion global market for custom womenswear and a stark absence of an organized player in the market.
Said an elated Rudra Pratap, “The typical tailor-customer relationship is a world-wide phenomenon and not unique to India. Our research told us that we had to provide an excellent user experience, responsive customer care and a disciplined offline fulfilment. We also realised that timing is very important to customer. Once you have given a particular date, you better stick to it. How do you achieve it is not customers’ problem.”
The duo sees the online tailoring market to grow at the rate of 20% annually for the next five years. The promoters are eyeing to garner the chunk of 10% of the customized Indian women’s wear market through online orders and 10% of the world market over the next 2 years. Over the last 5 months of operation, the start-up has delivered over 3,000 orders worth Rs. 14,00,000/- and the venture became profitable. Over 40% of these orders have come from United States, Singapore, Great Britain, Australia, Middle East, etc. They expect to register a turnover of Rs. 100 crores in the next three years. So far, the venture is funded from couple’s savings, friends and family.
These problems in tailor-customer relationship worldwide have had Indian Diaspora patronising the concept majorly. “Some degree of professionalism need to be inculcated among the tailors who have not been trained in these aspects” says Susmitha.
Continues Susmitha, “It has been hard initial months, family, children, low-budgets, fulfilment, demanding customers, etc. But it has been fun. What is also satisfying is that we have all happy and repeat customers. We are striving to get one pain off the table for mankind. The testimony of having never failed in our deadlines and quality are the repeat customers, I guess”.
The duo aspires big now. They have initiated plans to start Cloud Tailor fulfilment centres at Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune and Chennai to be able to offer a choice to the overseas and domestic customers to pick a city where they want the garments to be stitched and a Machine Learning based recommendation engine to be included in the mobile app.
