This ex-Versace fashionista wants to help millennials shop

Photo credit: Nicola

I am horribly unfashionable. Forget owning, I don’t even know how to pronounce some of those chic designer labels. Blame prudish boarding school upbringing, activist friends, diffidence, and an overwhelming inclination towards comfort over fashion, I have ended up with a limited wardrobe of rather boring clothes. But that doesn’t mean I am blind to smart shirts, cool skirts, stylish shoes – when I see others in them, I go “wow! where on earth did they find those!”

That’s the problem Veena Ashiya wants to fix. She wants to help people like me discover fashion. Her app, named Diskover, will show you a whole lot of hand-picked clothes, shoes, and accessories and lead you to the nearest store which has those in stock. Please note: this is not for the discount shopper. It’s for someone who wants tasteful stuff but doesn’t want to waste time hunting for it offline or online.

The big fat unsolved problem

Veena Ashiya, founder of Diskover

According to Veena, fashion is a solved problem in ecommerce for the first layer of consumers – those for whom price is the biggest factor that would swing a buying decision. From Flipkart’s Myntra to Jabong and Yepme, scores of fashion ecommerce sites cater to them with incredible discounts and offers.

“So they don’t really need another ecommerce site or app. As for the luxury layer on top who buy best designer stuff, they already know the brands and where to get them. But the middle layer needs help. They are the financially stable, mostly working, upwardly mobile lot. They can afford to be fashionable but don’t know where to find stuff that matches their tastes or are simply too busy to look,” Veena says. “Diskover is for them.”

This middle layer is a big, fat one of millennials – people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s aged between 25 and 34 today. They are about 2 billion strong globally, and India alone has over 600 million of them. Research by Youbrand pegs their combined global spending power at US$2.45 trillion. By 2017, they are expected to have more spending power than any other generation.

This middle layer of consumers, who are willing to pay money if they see value, is the gold mine that Veena and her co-founder Ravi Soni are going after.

From Tommy Hilfiger to Versace in New York and back

Veena and Ravi are friends. They stumbled upon the Diskover idea while shopping in Delhi for designer wear. “We went to a lot of terrific stores but it was hard to find what we wanted. That got us thinking,” Veena recalls.

Ravi is a technologist with a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. His first job was with Flipkart, handling search engine optimization for the ecommerce site. He went on to start digital marketing agency Obbserv and dabbled in angel investing with online grocer Instafrsh before co-founding Diskover.

Veena, on the other hand, digs fashion. She holds a master’s in fashion management studies from India’s prestigious National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT). She has worked with top brands like Tommy Hilfiger in India and Versace in New York. She moved back to India in 2011 to try her hand at starting up.

The struggle to stand out