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Hello reader,
Having successfully avoided Covid-19 for two and a half years, I finally succumbed to it last week. I’m all better now, but that one week of quarantine was pretty rough. Besides the fever and body aches, I feel like the toughest part was being stuck in my bedroom – even as a massive introvert, having the ability to go out taken away did a number on me.
This made it clear to me that simply being able to go out and take in some fresh air is essential, even for a veritable shut-in like myself. And this inherently human trait might’ve played a part in Pomelo Fashion’s revival in fortunes, with its impressive growth driven by offline retail sales.
Today we look at:
- Pomelo Fashion’s strong H1 2022
- The US$7.5 million series A round of an Indian edtech firm
- Other newsy highlights such as Tencent’s NFT shutdown and a new BNPL service in Vietnam
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Online isn’t everything for Pomelo Fashion
Image credit: Timmy Loen
A couple days ago, I saw someone share this quote on LinkedIn: “Creative people need time to sit around and do nothing.” Obviously, it’s a bit of a joke, but as a writer it really rings true. We can’t just be thinking up ideas and executing them all the time – the moments we spend away from writing fuels our creativity.
The movies I watch, the playlists I sing along to, the video games I binge for a whole week – these all inform my creative sensibilities. Diversity is important.
That seems to be a lesson that ecommerce platform Pomelo Fashion knows well. After a tough 2021 that saw revenues dip, Pomelo bounced back strong in the first half of the year, its omnichannel strategy paying off.
- Good-lookin’ numbers: For the first six months of 2022, Pomelo Fashion posted a year-on-year growth of 93% in net revenue and 134% in offline retail sales.
- Try it, then buy it: The two main drivers for this growth are the increase in sales from its brick-and-mortar stores and the rising traction of Tap.Try.Buy, a service that lets customers try on clothing items in their own homes and pay only for the items they want to keep.
- A Neapolitan strategy: Co-founder and CEO David Jou tells Tech in Asia that for H1 2022, 39% of Pomelo’s revenue came from offline retail while 35% were from ecommerce sales. The Tap.Try.Buy service accounted for the rest.
Read more: Pomelo nearly doubles revenue in H1 2022 driven by offline retail
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