Elanic, an online marketplace for selling and buying women’s pre-owned fashion goods, has raised seed round of funding. The funding round was led by Rebright Partners, a Japanese VC firm based in Singapore, along with the participation of TracxnLabs and Aneesh Reddy.
Founded in 2015 by Palkush Rai Chawla, Abhilash Narahari and Aditi Rohan, Elanic is a platform to shop right from the closets of your friends, along with being a destination to sell your gently used apparel and accessories. It is basically a social peer-to-peer marketplace for pre-owned items. The average user on Elanic has 10 products listed with a total worth Rs. 15,000.
Palkush Rai Chawla, co-founder of Elanic, said,
Getting over a billion people to not hoard and start selling is a large scale problem. While online classifieds work for some categories, they don’t really work for fashion.
Abhilash Narahari, co-founder of the company, said,
“Our idea is to build a platform that would make it ridiculously simple to buy and sell gently used items. By taking care of all the hassles involved, we want our users to enjoy the same conveniences that they are used to when shopping online.”
The company aims to pioneer shopping experience where women come together to buy and sell fashion. As the website is currently in beat phase, it is only operating in Bangalore. However, with new cash infusion, it is planning for a pan India presence.
It also has a mobile application through which you can browse the closets of several women on their portal and buy any item that interests you. You can also sell from your own closet by making a listing in under a minute. But, the app is currently available on invite-basis only.
If you make a sale, you will receive email from Elanic intimating you of the sale. You get a phone call from their logistics team to schedule pick-up. Once the item is shipped, you will get store credit of your amount, which you can cash-out any time. To generate revenues, the company takes 25% commission on each sale.
There are several fashion products marketplace in India but none related to the pre-owned fashion items. It will compete with fashion marketplace such as Wooplr which raised $5 million in Series A round.
