Pritika Mehta, co-founder of SockSoho, with some of the company’s socks (Image Credits: SockSoho)
SockSoho is a consumer-oriented logo that aspires to the “Uniqlo of India”.The company introduced sales 10 months ago, starting with men’s socks, and recently ended Y Combinator’s 2020 summer program.Founded through Pritika Mehta, a knowledge scientist who has worked at corporations such as TripAdvisor, and expansion marketing specialist Simarpreet Singh, SockSoho now has more than 30,000 consumers and plans to launch into new men’s fashion verticals in the near future.
Before launching SockSoho, Mehta and Singh worked in tandem at MindBatteries, an IP generation and content provider whose corporate clients included The Times of India, The Economic Times, Mercedes, Infosys, the World Economic Forum, and Uber.
Both depend on several points for SockSoho’s growth: India’s position as one of the world’s largest and most dynamic e-commerce countries and the company’s internal technology, which will come with patented chatbots and artificial intelligence-based advisory engines.
SockSoho presented a cross-platform distribution strategy, promoting both on its site and on e-commerce platforms, but its main engine is WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in India with more than 400 million users.Approximately 70% of SockSoho.s. sales are WhatsApp, and it also uses the messenger to market and test A/B products.
Eric Migicovsky, the Y Combinator spouse who invested in SockSoho, told TechCrunch in an email that SockSoho “looks like a trendy logo at first glance, but at the backend level, they function like a generation company. They check A / B. each and every facet of the product and e-commerce journey, not everything that all the trendy logos do. “
“I think the winning strategy here is WhatsApp,” he added.”They discovered out how to gain and serve consumers exclusively the platform.”
One of SockSoho’s gifts (Image Credits: SockSoho)
Prior to founding SockSoho, Mehta earned a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Buffalo, with a major in synthetic intelligence.He then spent several years in the United States, working in generation companies and adding TripAdvisor.your home country.
“When I saw the expansion decline in the Indian market, I found it phenomenal because the population is huge and the knowledge was becoming cheap.There has been a massive increase in the number of other people who buy groceries online,” he told TechCrunch.”That’s when I thought, what am I doing in the US?But it’s not the first time When all the action is happening in India?”
Most online fashion brands in India focus on women, so Mehta and Singh delve into men’s fashion. According to them, some two hundred million men live in Indian cities, representing a potential market of $8 billion. Before researching consumers, the two wrote a list of 80 articles they can interact with.Socks have won because they are easy to install and ship, and have higher margins and low return rates.
Before launching new socks, SockSoho plays its edition of the A/B tests WhatsApp through sending design concepts to consumers and measuring their interest in pre-orders before making production orders.
Data analytics is key to reducing the cost of marketing and acquiring visitors, a challenge for many businesses targeting consumers.
“We necessarily collect knowledge issues to perceive visitor habits and spending patterns, and this data helps us refine every single detail we build, from our designs to marketing and stock planning, and even to grow in long-term vertical sectors,” Mehta said.
The knowledge analysis has already revealed some surprises.For example, SockSoho expected the maximum of all its consumers to be male, but about 30% of total purchases are made through women who buy gifts.The founders of SockSoho also assumed that the maximum of their buyers would live in primary cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, however, their knowledge revealed that small towns were the main drivers of growth.”All this data comes from knowledge,” Singh said.
In the past six months, 58% of SockSoho consumers have made repeated purchases and sales have increased the COVID-19 blockade in India, which began in March.
“COVID has accelerated people’s transition to online shopping,” Singh said.”Like my father, he never did online shopping, but COVID even buys his toothpaste online.It’s a tectonic change.”
But many classic retail brands still have to beat the grocery shopping experience, Mehta added.
“With e-commerce, it’s not just about promoting the product,” he said.
To keep consumers engaged, SockSoho relies on WhatsApp to deliver percentages of new products and photos of visitors, but this non-public engagement point will become more complicated as the logo grows.
This is where the proprietary generation developing SockSoho comes in, which includes AI-based chatbots that can handle undeniable queries, such as exchanges, for example, a visitor who receives the item will be able to upload a photo and have a replacement Human visitor representatives will be informed of more confusing disorders.
“We build this proprietary software within the company, which may reflect human delight.We collect all the knowledge, all the interactions that are taking place with consumers lately to perceive the language, knowledge and kind of delight they like.Mehta says.
SockSoho is also developing its own AI-based advisory engine that will show consumers products that would possibly be of interest to them based on their browsing and shopping habits.The startup still doesn’t reveal which vertical sectors it will expand into next, but it’s already conducting A/B testing for its upcoming product lines.
“Once we build our generation pile, our entire source chain and nail the socks, it will be very simple for us to throw it to any other vertical and eventually to the Uniqlo of India,” Singh said.