PosterGully, an online marketplace for artists and designers to sell their original visual designs over products such as phone cases, posters etc., has raised angel round from a group of angel investors through LetsVenture’s platform.
PosterGully would be using up this fresh capital in hiring, marketing, growing the authentic artist community, expanding the product mix and building a strong mobile presence.
Founded by Bharat Sethi in 2013, PosterGully enables artists, designers and anyone who holds original visual content to seamlessly contribute and merchandise unique designs in a variety of products, such as phone cases, art prints, home décor, clothing etc. to consumers globally.
They produce these products on-demand ‘just in time’ through vendors across India through an API based automated process. PosterGully’s ambition behind such a marketplace is clear, “to grow their authentic community to hundreds of thousands of artists who have no means to currently monetize their designs”.
Founder and CEO at PosterGully, Seth says,
We’ve created a business where we’re operationally sound, cost efficient & ready to handle supply chain complexities at scale. We’re also excited for our mobile app launching soon which will disrupt the way we interact with creative professionals.
Once contributors upload their artwork to posterGully, consumers can almost immediately buy a wide range of merchandise of that particular design. The designs are checked for originality through reverse image engineering and the profile of the artist is also verified by the moderation team.
Thus, with no investment from the contributors at all, they instantly start getting revenue share on their sold designs. The company handles everything from technology, customer support & logistics.
And while most e-commerce brands are struggling to run an operationally sound business, PosterGully is fairing pretty decently on that front. Seth tells me, that PosterGully currently has over 250K+ unique user sessions every month, with a conversion ratio of ~3% and a customer acquisition cost of less than $1.
These sorts of metrics were only possible for us as a bootstrapped company because we had the power of direct branding, exclusivity of product line and scalability of a marketplace model.
adds Seth
PosterGully has Society6 and RedBubble to name as their global direct competitors, while in domestic market they face indirect competition from Chumbak, which offers customised youth-oriented products, and TouchTalent. However, PosterGully aims to disrupt the discovery of creative professionals through their upcoming Mobile App – Drooly.
