Mirraw.com.com, India’s leading online marketplace for a handpicked selection of ethnic jewellery, apparel, accessories and gifts has announced crossing the milestone Rs. 100-crore mark in 2015! In less than 4 years since inception, Mirraw.com.com has scaled at a most awe-inspiring rate to go from a bootstrapped venture which was incepted with merely Rs. 1 lakh to a study in building sustainable businesses in terms of revenue. With a strong focus on unit economies, Mirraw.com has now established its aim of clocking revenue growth of Rs.500 crore by the end of 2016.
Shailesh Jain, Co-founder, Mirraw.com said, “We are thrilled to close the financial year by registering revenues of Rs. 100 crore for Mirraw.com. It has been a remarkable journey, starting off as a bootstrapped venture with a small personal investment and now reaching this major milestone. By keeping our costs low, focussing on ROI-driven marketing and laying all the emphasis on a superlative product, Mirraw.com is today one of the most successful e-commerce ventures in the country. Our strategy of picking a single vertical, going deep into it and only then expanding into newer segments has worked very well. We plan to continue with this modest approach to achieve our next big goal for Mirraw.com, that of hitting the Rs. 500-crore mark by the end of 2016!”
The entire team at Mirraw.com believes that being bootstrapped actually helped the company grow at this accelerated pace. The emphasis on keeping costs low resulted in better returns on investment. The founders insisted on hiring the best talent for the company and this helped in building a solid backbone for Mirraw.com. Mirraw.com also kept its marketing and brand building efforts at an absolute minimum. It optimised its marketing campaigns as opposed to random scaling without a view on conversion factor.
Instead of ramping up its client acquisition efforts, as a bootstrapped company, Mirraw.com has always focussed on delivering a superb product. The team has consistently looked for new ways to give customers who visit the site a delightful shopping experience. The founders of Mirraw.com also believe that employing data analytics to better understand user behaviour has led to huge gains for the company by building real value for customers.
Another characteristic of the founders that gives Mirraw.com a huge competitive edge is the fact that being bootstrapped is in their DNA. Coming from humble, middle-class families, running a business with austerity and making every penny count is the only way of functioning that comes to them naturally and this has stood the company in great stead. Till date, the founders maintain their emphasis on frugal behaviour and continue to use the train or scooters to come to work.
Shailesh further added, “Since we didn’t have much money at the onset, we spent a lot of time and energy into figuring out new use cases that the customer would like to have; new channels/options that are yet unexplored and new product categories to add to our inventory. When you have 1,000 visitors on your site and 5 of those 1,000 are actual customers, you are faced with two choices for scale. You can boost your marketing efforts to get 2,000 visitors and thereby increase your customers to 10… Or you can try and understand what the 1,000 visitors want and fix your product to turn the 5 customers into 10. The second option is harder, more time consuming, but definitely more cost-effective and lucrative in the long term.”
Mirraw.com has over 3 lakh listed products and more than 3 million customers worldwide. It sells items from more than 3,000 vendors and ships out over 2,000 orders a day across the globe. Mirraw.com caters to three major categories including Sarees, Salwar Kameez and Jewellery. Within these three broad verticals, Mirraw.com offers products in over 20 sub-categories. It also has special segments for Kurtis, Home Furnishings and Gifts. Mirraw.com’s core USP is that it offers bespoke tailoring options for international customers and allows on-call orders for those who are still uncomfortable buying virtually.
