Megafash wants to give indie fashion and lifestyle brands the exposure they deserve

The shopping malls in Singapore are an almost exact reflection of the island-state’s status as a global business hub – every last one of them is jam-packed with the hottest international brands such as Uniqlo, Chanel, and H&M. Local indie brands, in the meantime, end up occupying corner units in malls with lesser human traffic simply because they do not have the funds and means to grab more prominent spots.

Jiawen Ngeow, the former head of business development at lifestyle e-zine Poached Magazine, first observed this trend back in 2012. To her, it seemed like international brands were getting all the attention and help needed to market and sell their products, while independent labels seemed fairly helpless. This meant limited offerings in the market for customers to pick from.

Ngeow decided to create an online marketplace called Megafash, focusing exclusively on homegrown indie brands in early 2014. “This is where we thought we could create the most impact […] By championing more local players, some of whom are not able to reach the masses easily, we are able to offer a far greater array of products than the current offering,” Ngeow explains.

This was also an opportunity to help local entrepreneurs make a name for themselves. “With international players at the forefront of ecommerce picking up in Singapore, leaving behind independent brands will mean leaving behind a lot of our fellow local entrepreneurs,” she adds. “Currently, the brands enjoy the clear benefits of sales and exposure.”

Megafash started off as a fashion-focused platform, but recently expanded to include lifestyle and design products to cater to the rise of an “increasingly design-savvy and artistically-inclined audience.” Ngeow tells Tech in Asia that they will be looking out for the gents with the upcoming introduction of menswear brands.

A quick perusal of the website reveals that there are 168 Singaporean brands registered on Megafash – a sizable number. Ngeow claims that their best performing brand “made S$10,000 (US$8,000) in sales in a month […] We heard from them that this is way more than the sales they get at other marketplaces.” She declined to reveal any other numbers beyond that.

TheScarletRoom is one example of an indie brand from Singapore finding success on the platform. One of the top-selling brands on Megafash, it has seen over 700 sales from mid-2014 to date.

One of the reasons why there are so many brands on Megafash might be the relatively low 10-percent commission fee. “We kept it low because we have heard from some independent brands that their production costs can be very high, giving them very little margins. We want to keep commissions low on this platform and allow as many independent brands to join as possible,” Ngeow explains.

The team’s next target is to expand to Indonesia. Already, they’ve gone beyond Singapore’s shores to Malaysia, where Ngeow claims to have gotten some good traction, though the website shows just seven registered brands from the latter country:

Our business model is proven in Singapore, so we took the step into Malaysia to test how the product can scale. Malaysia has shown good traction even though we have done limited marketing and have not released the full marketplace.