IIT Graduates bring Fashion, Fun & Friends under one roof through Social Commerce Platform allMemoirs

With the explosion of Online Shopping, it’s often hard to keep track of so many portals. allMemoirs, founded by Mrigank Shekhar and Kush Srivastava helps to solve this problem through Social Commerce. Extrapolating data from US market and Indian market forecasts, Social Commerce, Product Discovery should be a 250M market in India by 2015, and increase even further over the years. allMemoirs is a product classification, tagging and recommendation platform with a fully personalized experience.

Mrigank Shekhar  and Kush Srivastava are both IIT Delhi Graduates. Mrigank, CEO had earlier worked at RSA, Qwest and was leading the Engineering of a 40M$ Security product before starting allMemoirs. Kush had previously worked at mCheck and Qwest. He was the Technology Head at mCheck before starting allMemoirs.  While Mrigank takes care of Marketing and Hiring efforts, Kush looks after products.

How does allMemoirs Platform work?

In a nutshell, the product is to make online shopping, discovering Fashion trends and finding gifts hassle free, personalized and to the point. The team handpicks products from multiple e commerce sites and the consumers see them personalized to their likes and tastes.  The platform currently hosts accessories, arts n crafts , health/beauty, books, electronics, jewellery, lifestyle, sports and intimacy among other categories.Products are classified into Gift Ideas based on Relation, Occasion, Mood, Interests, Age and Price Range, making it easy for Users to discover gifts. Also, users can save products into three buckets, what they like, what they wish and what they want to gift.

For Online Merchants, allMemoirs provide a marketing platform to reach targeted shoppers with their new product launches, popular products and seasonal promotions. On challenges faced so far, Mrigank says –

Online shoppers always look out for tangible benefits like discount coupons/sale. As our benefits are not directly out on the face it’s difficult to get that “love at first sight” thought from the customer. However we do feel that our product capabilities will counter this and our perseverant marketing strategies will get on the new customers and our personalized classification engine will retain them for long.

allMemoirs Founders : Mrigank Shekhar and Kush Srivastava

Traction since Launch

Launched in May 2013, at the moment, allMemoirs has 5500 Registered Users,  60000 monthly visits (bulk of the visits are from Mobile Apps),  1.25 Lakh Facebook Fans and ~ 10000 monthly referrals to e-comm sites.

4 Months since Launch, the mobile apps have crossed 25000 Downloads (including iOS and Android), and see a decent  200-250 downloads Daily (including iOS and Android).  The iPhone Fashion Trends App is ranked within the Top 20 in the Lifestyle category in India.  As we see from the above stats, allMemoirs has a mobile first strategy. In the words of Mrigank,

We have always been focused on Mobile Apps and Website. The reason is two fold: firstly, the future for anything online is Mobile and secondly, Our App is a great way to browse products from the mobile, on the go or from anywhere. Users can browse trends, gifts and Save these products into buckets of likes, wishlists and giftlists. These lists are available to Users when they go to their desktop or laptop to actually shop something.

Half of our Traffic comes from Mobile Apps, and 75% comes from Mobile App and Mobile Website combined. It makes sense for us to focus completely on our Mobile platform, while keeping our desktop version just up to date with our offerings. In fact, going forward, we are planning App-only features as well.

allMemoirs Mobile Interface

The team uses lossy image compression technique, which compresses images to almost 20-30% of their original size. Though the compression is not lossless, the loss in clarity is not visible to the naked eye. This makes image loading faster on all their platforms, resulting in much consumer satisfaction.

 Funding and Revenue Sources

The founders Mrigank and Kush have significant experience in Mobile Payments and Security, and provide Consulting Services to relevant clients, a few of whom are international.

The consulting practice generates sufficient revenue to fund all aspects of allMemoirs, including Marketing money, Salaries and Infrastructure expenditure.

The startup is looking at a well-defined monetization model for the space allMemoirs operates in, namely Consumer Internet. The team has defined a couple of models to monetize their offerings, and are now focusing on implementing them. End consumers discovering products/gift ideas from allMemoirs portal/application leads to affiliation revenue from the merchant. The startup also plans to serve as a marketing platform for the merchants to display their new products/promotions – which will be revenue generating.
The team expects to see revenues from allMemoirs by end of Q1, 2014.

Near Future Plans

In near future, the startup plans to take product discovery to next level through the below features, says Mrigank.

We are making Personalization more fine grained, where in our tags (used for categorization), will be made public and users can choose which tag to follow and which to not. We want to add Social features around User based curation and the ability to follow fashion bloggers.

There are also plans to add value added features for Merchants to enable them to bulk upload products and get reports on their product performance.

TTP’s take on allMemoirs

We took a thorough look at the platform. Few things worth mention are the UI, categories and the picks across each category. After I spending around 15 minutes, I could finalize a few things I could potentially buy.  The chrome bookmarklet is handy, and it helps people add from other websites than the ones curated via allMemoirs. As Mrigank mentions, the images load amazingly fast, and I did not have to wait for a single image to load. The mobile app is easy to navigate, which explains the download numbers. The only complaint I have is, despite having 1.25 lakhs of Facebook fans, the social activity does not appear very high on the portal.  The platform would have huge advantage, if most of their social followers actively start sharing on the social media.

This is an interesting startup to watch out, and we wish allMemoirs team all the very best!