We are publishing an interview of Ms. Ishita Khosla, Founder & CEO, Confidress.
About the founders
Founded by the zeal of a young mind and sophistication of a Business Administration and Marketing graduate from Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. Ishita was inspired by the opportunity to blend the styling world with an innovative approach to technology. She believes this revolution in the fashion world will enhance each person’s individuality, style and passion. She is convinced that with the right styling, each person can be confident in the way they look. Ishita founded Confidress to style people to look good, feel great and achieve everyday confidence.
What is the problem you are trying to solve? Can you share with us any insights that led you to believe that this is a big enough problem?
People want to look good but don’t have the awareness or confidence to choose what will look the best on them. Confidress provides a platform where anyone, can dress well according to their budget, body type and need without being constrained by time.
I know several people who are unsure of their choice when they go shopping. For instance, my friend always complained about how her hips looked ‘fat and ugly’, which took away her confidence whenever she had to go out with us. She was a pear body type, so naturally the oversized dresses she wore would make her body look bigger. However, she had no idea about body types. So one day, I took her shopping and bought her A-line skirts & dresses that skim over the hips, and smartly cover any extra weight around the lower body. She felt her ‘world had changed’, only by wearing what’s right for her body type.
This one experience made me believe that confidence and the correct style has the power of affecting one’s life in positive ways. Confidress helps you achieve that everyday confidence and style in the way that you look through our expert stylists and innovative brands.
What is the uniqueness about your Startup?
- Expert stylists to curate looks best suited for you for free.
- Access to a selection of the most innovative and high quality brands.
- One stop fashion portal for all fashion needs: browse the latest trend or shop the latest styles.
- Easy, convenient and effortless shopping.
- Contemporary, stylish and trendy fashion.
What is the revenue model?
We are offering free personal styling for a limited time to our consumers and therefore are charging a nominal commission to our brands for marketing and selling their products.
Once we have our customer base setup, we will adopt a service fee structure by charging our customers a nominal styling fee.
Who are the consumers that you are targeting? How is this going to affect them?
We are targeting every person who wants to look and feel good no matter the budget. We offer clothing and accessories for men and women including Indian and Western wear across all budget ranges. We will help each individual style and bring out their best through their dressing so that they can achieve everyday confidence with a click of their smartphone.
What is the big picture of your startup? Will it lead to something bigger? If so, how?
We are creating a revolution in the fashion Industry. We plan to change the customer shopping behaviour by making shopping effortless and easy. The quality e-commerce industry is the future of our country. We want to be an honest, sincere, and value based company to our customers through our one stop fashion portal. Confidress has a team of innovators constantly working to achieve higher standards in customer satisfaction. Hence, we will keep implementing new features and upgrades on our website.
What is the success story of your startup in your own words?
Conceptualizing a completely new idea, which has never been done before has been one of the biggest challenge. The ideation bit was fairly easy however tailoring the idea for Indian market and the Indian customer behaviour was the toughest. We conducted extensive due diligence to validate our idea from conducting several market studies, focus groups to even asked people randomly walking on the streets of New Delhi. Bringing the concept live was an iterative task as each set of feedback meant updating and adapting our model so that we could build a platform, which can please everyone in the Indian audience who is looking for style update. We will continue to dynamically adapt our model as we aim to provide a customizable unique looks for each customer. Customizing and bringing the product to live required integrating the best technology available and meant a lot of late night brainstorming sessions with the best software engineers, developers and designers. We hope that our hard work, dedication and passionate to create a revolution, will result in success and revolutionise the way the Indian consumers shop.
Any other information about your startup that you would like to share with us.
We plan to launch our e-commerce portal early October. However, we are active on social media providing our followers with latest styling tips, trend alerts and fashion news. Each post aims to educate our followers something new about fashion. You can follow us on Instagram or Facebook to stay tuned.
Thanks Ishita. Best of luck!