Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What were good sources of emails for you?

Kiyan Foroughi: Our on-site campaigns are usually the most successful ones. But we had fine-tuned a way with Facebook ads to really get some good subscribers that would activate into good customers. The other thing was partnerships.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing Facebook advertising. Is that what you’re saying?

Kiyan Foroughi: We did Facebook advertising. The other thing was partnerships with some of our affiliates. We were looking inside our affiliates where the best customers were coming from. Those were sites like ShopStyle and all these shopping searching engines. We built partnerships with them. We said, “We want to do lead generation partnerships with you. We can have a landing page on your website. You direct traffic towards it and we pay you per email.” That was a very good source of leads for us and one of the best converting ones.

Sramana Mitra: In 2013, when you were raising Series A, what was the revenue run rate?

Kiyan Foroughi: It was probably around $4 million by the time we raised our Series A. We have gone from a business that was doing low single-digit number of orders per day to one that was doing close to triple digits. We went over triple digits once we raised our Series A round.

Sramana Mitra: $4 million in revenue run rate and who are the investors for the Series A?

Kiyan Foroughi: A lot of the old guys re-invested, but the new lead investor is a UK fund called MNC Ventures. They led the round.

Sramana Mitra: How did they cross paths with you?

Kiyan Foroughi: When we were fund raising, we were introduced to them. My co-founder at that time knew someone who knew a partner at the fund. Her friend put us in touch with the partner.

Sramana Mitra: What are the next steps of strategic steps that you took with that additional funding? What levers did you push to attain further growth?

Kiyan Foroughi: We actually took a few steps back in order to take a giant leap forward. We noticed that there were things that we needed to improve with our website. We had lots of points of friction in the purchasing, conversion, browse, communication, and interactivity on the website. We also felt that the team needed an upgrade. A lot of the original team that we had hadn’t really picked up the skills that they needed to have in order to take the business on to the next level. We also wanted really to improve our customer experience post-purchase. That’s where the DHL partnership came into place. We actually didn’t have DHL until we launched our new website last year. Prior to that, it was just the designers going to the post office and shipping it.

We basically looked at all the data and figured out all our points of friction. We improved it before we started accelerating the business. We used those funds to bring on board some talented director level people. That’s the equivalent in the US to seed C-level executive. Beyond my co-founder and myself, there was nobody else that was senior. We brought on board Product Director and Fashion and Brand Director to really improve the governance and the level of talent that was in the business. At the end of the day, it’s all about the people. We used the funds to bring in high-caliber expensive candidates. We then went back to the drawing board and improved the website. The website that you see today is very different from the website that was previously there. We also went through re-branding to make the proposition a lot more coherent to the user. Once we launched the new site, we really pressed on acceleration and started growing the business even more.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca
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