“Indian social commerce industry to see 71.5% growth to touch $8,258.8 mn in 2022”

“The aspirational youth of the hinterland aspire to live a lifestyle comparable to their peers in the metropolitan cities of India,” says Woovly Co-founder-COO Neha Suyal. According to her, the aspirational youth of the hinterland aspire to live a lifestyle comparable to their peers in the metropolitan cities of India. “They are now seeking and consuming lifestyle products through the social commerce route, facilitated by social commerce platforms. They also desire customised products that they are able to access through social commerce platforms like Woovly,” she says in an interview with Adgully.

Excerpts:

What inspired you to launch Woovly? How did you build it and how has the journey thus far included the challenges?

In 2015, I met my co-founder Venkat J. at a Stanford programme, and the idea of Woovly was seeded. We discovered we had a shared interest in studying and predicting consumer-buying behaviour and our belief that buyers were increasingly tending towards discovering products and brands online rather than offline. Venkat’s earlier venture Quess Corp had an enviable IPO before this in 2015.

After the short-term programme, I worked for two years at Quess Corp. During this stint, I travelled extensively across small towns and cities, termed Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, in India and realised that the young population had aspirations to achieve the lifestyle of their peers in urban India or the Tier 1 cities. We recognised that there was a latent need for a platform that would give them an opportunity to fulfil their ambitions. Later on, when we finally decided to go down the entrepreneurial path, this learning, along with our faith in online brand discovery, led us to social commerce and Woovly. It was launched as an adventure experience platform, but pivoted to social commerce for fashion, beauty, and lifestyle products during the pandemic.

Woovly faced its biggest challenge in early 2020. When the pandemic struck, we had just started getting heavy traction and had over a million users. But travel came to a standstill, and we had to think on our feet to transform ourselves to adapt to the changing environment. We decided to serve it as a unified experience on our app, this time with fashion, beauty, and lifestyle products.

How is Woovly  different from other social commerce players?

Woovly is different from its peers in terms of user-generated content, which is relatable and driven by micro and nano influencers. It blends three Cs, that is, Content, Community, and Commerce, together to bring a “shoptainment” experience to users spread across Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns. Woovly is setting new benchmarks in organic and sustainable growth. This growth is sustainable because our cost of content creation (arguably one of the biggest cost centers in the content-driven commerce space) is very low. In addition to this, our user acquisition costs are minimal too. Social commerce players spend thousands per SKU just for content creation.

We rely on our content creator community comprising micro and nano influencers to create brand-tagged content. So, our spending on generating video content is zero.

Also, more than 50% of our users are acquired organically, that is, through content creators and buyers who act as advocates and influencers. The cost, therefore, is indirect and is in sync with Woovly’s earnings.

How is your platform changing the way Bharat shops?

Woovly brings aspirational brands to Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns of India through content-driven social commerce. We empower micro and nano content creators across social media platforms to bring the window shopping experience into an app. Woovly is partly responsible for a silent revolution that is taking place among the youth in Tier 2 and 3 towns of India. The aspirational youth of the hinterland aspire to live a lifestyle comparable to their peers in the metropolitan cities of India. They are now seeking and consuming lifestyle products through the social commerce route, facilitated by social commerce platforms. They also desire customized products that they are able to access through social commerce platforms like Woovly.

What is the future of social commerce in India?

Growing social media usage, the high number of Internet users, and the almost cheapest data costs in the world have set the stage for rapid growth and expansion in the social commerce space. The Indian social commerce industry is expected to grow by 71.5% annually to touch $8,258.8 million this year. This is largely fuelled by rising lifestyle aspirations and higher disposable incomes of Gen Z and millennials living in Bharat. To meet the consumption demands of this category, we think social commerce will increasingly occupy a larger slice of the e-commerce pie, and more niche D2C brands will rise to create more customised products demanded by this segment.

How does Woovly harness the power of influencers in the hinterlands?

The short-format content creators in the hinterland have their own loyal followers who understand and relate to their content due to the demographic “likeness”. We empower such influencers for content creation. They create videos and brand tag them while posting. When their followers watch the videos, they click on the tags and discover the new brands on offer. After watching a few similar videos, they finally make a purchase decision and click on the tags to buy from the Woovly platform. The influencers receive a fee for every transaction that originated from their video content. Woovly is one of the few platforms which reward its creators for every transaction.

Through the Woovly Creator Academy, we hope to train more young girls across Tier 2 and 3 cities so that they can prepare and shoot video content. When they create content and build their community as micro and nano influencers, they get the opportunity to earn a livelihood or supplement their income through incentives on our platform.

How have you turned CM2-positive? What are your future plans?

Woovly has, since its inception, focused on organic growth, keeping a tight leash on costs that are otherwise high for e-commerce or social commerce businesses. The fact that we have a marketplace model, along with primarily organic user acquisition and content is purely user-generated, have all played a role in keeping our variable costs low and achieved a positive contribution margin. 

In 2022, we are looking to grow the number of D2C brands by 400% and expand to four or more categories to bring lifestyle products to our users. We aim to reach out to customers in their own language, that is, vernacular languages. By the end of the year, each content creator on the Woovly platform would be able to supplement their income by at least Rs 12,000 per month, on average. Our target is to capture 15% of the $100 billion social commerce market in the next five years; and 2022 will set the tone to reach this target.