To meet the rising demands of young, fashion-conscious women in Africa, Kenyan fashion e-commerce company ShopZetu is expanding its portfolio to include beauty and home décor categories.
To this end, it has raised pre-seed capital to support the expansion of its marketplace beyond Kenya.
In the next few months, it plans to develop geographically while luring in worldwide fashion labels and more than double the number of sellers on its platform to 1,000.
Equipped with a $1 million pre-seed fundraising round that it recently finished, the firm intends to expand beyond Kenya, where it debuted in 2021, to test regional distribution services in Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.
“The objective is for ShopZetu to emerge as the top lifestyle site.
We want to provide more options in the areas of hair, skincare, beauty, and home décor all areas where a person may show their individuality. Our goal is to become a one-stop store,” stated Marvin Kiragu, CEO of ShopZetu, who, alongside Wandia Gichuru, co-founded the well-known Kenyan fashion company Vivo.
Chui Ventures led the pre-seed investment, and Launch Africa, Roselake Ventures, and Logos Ventures also participated. The CEO of RT Knits Kendall Tang, the co-founder and CEO of Nadine West Ben Munoz, and the CEO of Estée Lauder Inc.
Sumit Bhasin, the CEO of WPP Scangroup Patricia Ithau, and the CEO of Twiga Foods Peter Njonjo are among the angel investors that participated in the round.
According to Kiragu, who spoke with TechCrunch, ShopZetu was created in response to the demand for a multi-brand marketplace to connect a severely fragmented market with “hundreds of thousands of sellers” both offline and online, including on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. He pointed out that this results in a difficult purchasing process that lacks client trust and pricing visibility.
He went on to say that because there are an endless number of different stock-keeping units, it is practically impossible for any one person to hold the whole selection in one physical area.
“ShopZetu aims to address this issue by consolidating the existing inventory of fashion and lifestyle items into a single location,” he stated.
There are presently over 20,000 goods listed on the ShopZetu marketplace, with over 300 sellers, mostly consisting of small and major local producers and traders of imported fashion products. Onboarding of vendors is free of charge; however, they get payment for extra services, such as delivery, and for sales that are made on the platform.
We also provide warehousing, digital marketing, last-mile delivery, content creation, and return management to our vendors. To guarantee that vendors are successful online, these services are provided at a fee, although they are heavily subsidized,” Kiragu added.
“We want to make it easier for anybody to launch and grow a fashion company by utilizing ShopZetu’s extensive network and resources.
He stated, “We have excellent case studies of firms that were nurtured and introduced on ShopZetu before expanding online and opening physical locations.
The startup stipulates that, among other requirements, retailers selling on the marketplace must offer inclusive sizing, high-quality items, and be well-stocked.
According to the firm, within the last 24 months, it has catered to more than 30,000 clients, sold over 100,000 items, and seen a 400% rise in monthly orders since January 2021.
ShopZetu claims to be keeping an eye on the expanding sub-Saharan African fashion market, which is now dominated by used apparel.
Startups such as ShopZetu, however, are relying on the expanding fashion-conscious and tech-savvy population in Africa as well as reasonably priced new apparel alternatives to fuel their expansion.
“We think there is a huge market for fashion because clothes are a basic human need.”
Although a significant portion of this is now satisfied by used apparel, Kiragu noted that as more reasonably priced choices become available, there is a slow transition to new apparel.
“We think that the largest e-commerce category in Africa will be online fashion retail, surpassing formal retail.”
Content courtesy of TechCrunch, ShopZetu & NFH
