India’s First Fashion Forecasting Company – My story as an entrepreneur

About company

My company f-trend.com belongs to the fashion trend spotting business consultancy – it’s a B2B business module. According to telegraph UK report of 2011, fashion trend spotting was £36bn growth business

I passed my college in 2011 with a degree in fashion design. Well everyone knows that it’s very easy to manufacture but it’s not as easy to sell. So I didn’t plan to follow suit, instead, I started to work for a fashion consultancy rather than to start as a designer.

My journey- Phase1

Since my family did not belong to business and my education was in the creative field, it was a steep learning curve for me during 2011. I didn’t register my company, instead registered its trademark. Since I do belong to a medium class family with 3 brothers, to save money I started to learn coding so that I could build my company’s website without much investment. It took about 6 months to understand how to create a website and to manage hosting, data uploading, database etc. I understood the power of the internet as mobile technology was expected to have rapid growth so I believed my idea would take 2-3 years to flourish.

Competitor’s analysis –

It’s very important to understand how our competitors are doing, their business modules, and targeted customer groups. I decided to give time to understand and explore how these companies were working and the services they were providing, their marketing strategy, website functionality, revenue, loss and important points they were missing. It took more than one year to understand all this. I started to subscribe to various website demos to learn more about their website functionality.

With every demo I learned new things – quickly I started to add those features on my website. I learnt how to promote the website, SEO, social media marketing, and many things. Since these companies were more than 20-25 years old it was not easy to beat them.

Competing them in google- My strategy was to get listed on the first page of google for the fashion forecasting agency keyword groups. I realized later that Joomla CMS is not search engine friendly also it was very difficult to extend additional features. Luckily after lots of research, I moved to Drupal which helped me to get ranked very well in all major search engines. Drupal also helped to add and extend missing features which were not possible previously.

PHASE 2

From 2011-2013, it was a time period of learning and understanding market, competition. Now I started to get inquiries about our services from across the globe. I didn’t prefer to open an office and waste money in interiors as I had limited money which I got as pocket money from dad. I started to get at least 1-2 inquiries monthly from India, USA and UK. The website was ready and I kept on adding research work. I required more workforce to update a website. Since I was not able to pay a single penny I decided to hire employees based on project work. For that purpose, I added a career section on my website which helped me attract great fashion research professionals across the world.

The first client –  in October 2013 my first client was a shoe making company, I managed to get $999 for a 6months deal. I was managing alone all the content work for my subscription based website. All I can say I had a good profit as my website was hosted on a cheap 3 year’s shared hosting plan of the Hostgator.

The customer is the king – the first learning.

I started to learn about customer experience, ease of website use and how to help our customer/client succeed.

Pricing strategy- pricing strategy plays an important role. Being new to business I couldn’t demand as much as our competitors were demanding so I slashed 10% of the current market pricing.

Slowly we started to attract more clients. I also discovered new client groups apart from fashion stream from movies to advertising agencies and event management companies.

From 2014-2015

2014-2015 we started to see a rapid growth of online retailers, along with brick and mortars. Now my company started to get more inquiries. I also planned to target students with subsidized rate of our subscription services, with $25/Month to get more traffic and popularity. My plan was to get as much as at least 100 students every year.

Currently, we are having more than 70 freelance employees working on projects basis from USA, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Hong Kong, Spain.

We are also currently in talks with Morgan-Stanley NYC group to start collaborative research work in apparel and footwear fashion.

Rough Roads-

We are very traditional in our approach. After passing my college everyone in my family expected me to start working in a good company as we hate taking risks. For two years every day from 11am to 2am I used to work without getting carried away by the expectation of results. Shrimad Bhagwat Gita helped me to concentrate only on work rather than on results as we don’t have control over the outcome. As 90% of the companies fail during first two years my calm and work oriented attitude helped me survive. Yes, it’s taken 5 years and still it’s not a billion dollar company but I believe I can make it more than a 10 billion dollar service based company. 

Funding

Well during 2011 to 2014 I didn’t know anything about VC, seed, angel funding until one of my friends told me to look for investment from some VCs. Now I feel like it’s time to spread our network and hire all my freelance workers as full-time employees, along with business developers. 

At last an end note-

• Success is not how much you earn – it’s all about satisfaction based on your dreams and goals
• Nothing is impossible, don’t decide the future based on present and past experiences.
• Concentrate on work not on the result- Follow Krishna’s law- Yoga is skill development, you have control over your work not on results so don’t try to.
• Trust yourself as according to Krishna doubt is the reason of fear and sorrows; trust makes you happy.
• Be like a sponge, ready to gain every bit of knowledge from each and every person.
• Competition is good as it validates your product is in demand.
• Meditate
• Sharing your knowledge is a good thing for growth of your company.
• Stay away from naysayers
•  Thanks to Alok sir for helping entrepreneurs by providing this great platform

Twitter handle- @dhruvafashion, website- F-trend.com

Pls excuse my grammar.