This new app wants to help women sell the clothes they don’t need

When you see a pair of beautiful shoes in a shop window, your heart can’t help but skip a beat. You go into the store and take a peek at the price tag. You know it’s too much. You walk around the store looking for something more affordable but with your eyes and heart fixated on that very first pair of shoes you saw in the display. You go back, throw monetary caution into the wind and decide to buy that pair anyway. You wear them to a party and everybody loves them. You get back and carefully wrap the shoes in the same yet crumpled wrapping paper and keep them safely inside the box, and then store it in a warm corner of your precious closet.

Months later, one day, you find the box and open it and see the pair of shoes you were once in love with. You realize that it’s time to let go but you have to find a worthy owner for them. This is where one of a number of startup marketplaces would come in handy. For fashion lovers and impulsive buyers in India, Elanic wants to be the answer.

Bangalore-based Elanic started in 2014 to standardize the process of buying and selling used clothes, shoes, accessories, jewelry, and handbags. The primary goal was to avoid the problems that would arise in a situation that involves transacting used products.

Convincing people

Generally, people hesitate to purchase used products – even more so with clothes because they’re so personal. Buying them is even trickier – it requires a sense of trust and assurance of its quality. “In India people tend to believe that used clothes are not worth spending money on and our challenge is to change their mindset,” Abhilash Narahari, co-founder at Elanic, tells Tech in Asia. The startup plans to face the challenge by providing consistent service and developing a credible environment for women to transact from the comfort of their homes.

“Most of the times people don’t necessarily have to meet to complete a transaction, so we wanted to to eliminate that element involved in customer-to-customer transactions,” says Narahari. The usual process one might face during a person-to-person transaction is fulfilling obligations of meeting, negotiating, and finally reaching a mutually agreed price.

On Elanic, things work a little differently. All a user has to do is create a listing on the app by taking the photo of the item they want to sell, mention a few details, and set the price, and then the item is picked up from the their door step. The thing is then inspected for any wear and tear, brand authenticity, size, and hygiene, and is sanitized. After all that, it’s packed and shipped to the buyer. This only covers Bangalore at present.

As for the buyers – they get to browse through an array of high fashion, gently used products that they normally wouldn’t find at a lower price at the store.

Invite-only

Narahari and Palkush Rai Chawla, another co-founder, began Elanic after experiencing the rough edges of consumer-to-consumer transactions. Their aim is to create utility out of the idle part of a woman’s closet. So they got Aditi Rohan along as another co-founder, a National Institute of Fashion Technology graduate and a shopping enthusiast. “Many women tend to shop a lot even if they don’t end up wearing over 30 percent of the things they buy and we thought our idea would create purpose,” Narahari says. Both Narahari and Chawla studied together at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and worked for ITC before venturing into the used fashion marketplace.

Elanic launched an app recently and is currently available only on invite. Without an invite code, the user is put on a waiting list to join the app. The number of users on the waiting list is close to 800. It is free to list any items for sale on the app; once a sale is made, the seller is charged a commission of 25 percent of the sale value.