For Suchi Mukherjee, the inspiration for starting Limeroad, an online discovery platform for apparel, beauty products, bags, accessories and footwear for women, grew from her love for flipping through fashion magazines. “Every time I liked something in the magazine, I would often wish I could buy those products easily,” says Mukherjee. 

Making this possible became the premise on which Mukherjee, who has worked with Skype, eBay and Gumtree in the UK, started LimeRoad with Ankush Mehra. Mehra used to be the head of supply chain at Reliance Hypermarkets. Together, Mukherjee and Mehra brought in a unique  blend of e-commerce and hard logistics to make their new venture work. 

When LimeRoad was launched in October 2012, it was designed to have the look and feel of a glossy fashion catalogue. “We didn’t want to look like a transactional website that just lists inventory.” Users could flip through the pages to go through the collection of clothes, bags and accessories that vendors offered on the LimeRoad platform—essentially mirroring the experience of using a fashion magazine offline. What’s more, to build the concept of social interactivity, the LimeRoad team introduced the Scrapbook feature. Here, users could mix and match different apparels, accessories and bags.  

Without us realising, the Scrapbook has become an expression for style."- Suchi Mukherjee

Scrapbook lets users create different “looks” by dragging and dropping different products available on the platform to the scrapbook box, for instance, pairing the bag, jewellery and shoes to go with the right dress. “When getting dressed up, everybody decides on a top or trousers first and then thinks about the different accessory options to go with the outfit. Here, they ask their family and friends to suggest the scarves, belt and earrings that go nicely with the look. This is such an intrinsic part of human behaviour that we wanted LimeRoad to provide it,” explains Mukherjee. 

So, Scrapbook allowed users to share the “looks” they created with their friends through Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. This tool made LimeRoad much like a social network platform where women could discover products, and share it with their friends to get a second opinion. They can then buy it if their friends approve of it too. 

Social shopping and its integration with social media help to initiate conversations among users about the product and the website, thereby creating more user engagement, says Mehra. This also gives other users ideas on how to wear a particular dress differently. “LimeRoad isn’t just an online store—it is a discover, share and shop platform in the true sense,” he adds.  

A glance at the "looks" fashioned by the Scrapbooker's at Limeroad

The scrapbook community grew slowly for the first three-four months. From March 2013 onwards though, it has been growing at 40 per cent month on month. Mukherjee says they’ve noticed that many women use the Scrapbook like a hobby, almost like sketching or doodling. In their free time, they create looks and share it with their friends through social media. “Without us realising, the Scrapbook has become their way of expression for style,” says Mukherjee. Even when they don’t end up buying the products, the sharing leads to getting more women interested in LimeRoad. 

For instance, a regular user studying at Aligarh Muslim University, has made 353 scrapbook looks in eight months. There are similar examples in places such as Ranchi, Kalyan, Chandigarh and Chennai who have become city leaders and help create buzz about LimeRoad in their respective communities. To encourage these scrapbookers, Prashant Malik, who joined the co-founding team of LimeRoad in March 2013, decided playing up these scrapbooks on their home page to maintain the scrapbookers’ enthusiasm.  Their earlier static magazine-like format didn’t allow that. In June 2013, LimeRoad re-designed their homepage to be a live feed, much like the Facebook newsfeed. It gets updated every 30 seconds, and comes with an infinite scroll. That way, users can see three new “looks” or products every 30 seconds, informs Malik. The scrapbook community grew slowly for the first three-four months. From March 2013 onwards though, it has been growing at 40 per cent month on month. Mukherjee says they’ve noticed that many women use the Scrapbook like a hobby, almost like sketching or doodling. In their free time, they create looks and share it with their friends through social media. “Without us realising, the Scrapbook has become their way of expression for style,” says Mukherjee. Even when they don’t end up buying the products, the sharing leads to getting more women interested in LimeRoad. 

More scrapbook updates on the homepage has helped increase page views for LimeRoad, which recently raised Series B funding of $15 million from Tiger Global, Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Ventures. In standard e-commerce sites people load eight pages per visit, but in LimeRoad they load around 20-plus pages, says Mukherjee. This means users generate thrice the amount of action and page views per session on LimeRoad versus any other alternative available to them in the market.  

This also gives more visibility to the products on the website. For instance, in September 2013, apparel brand Femella had posted a red dress on the LimeRoad website. That dress become quite popular among the scrapbook community and was used to create around 80-90 “looks”. That meant the dress was being shown at 90 different pages. Generally, a vendor like Femella blocks two-three pieces for a particular website. But, thanks to the scrapbooks, ten pieces of this dress were quickly sold out on LimeRoad, says Deepti Bhadauria, the company’s head of marketing. In fact, Bhadauria adds that Femella blocked all its ten pieces for them—some of that stock they had earlier put on Jabong which hadn’t got sold as quickly there. 

Keeping their vendors interested is a big  win for a company like LimeRoad as it operates on a marketplace model. It’s only logical that vendors are engaged when they sell more. Today, LimeRoad has 450-plus vendors, a big jump from the 25 they began with in October 2012. What’s more—nearly 50 per cent of the products displayed by vendors are exclusively for LimeRoad customers. “The high conversion rate of sales is the reason why vendors have agreed to enter into exclusivity agreement with us,” Mukherjee explains. LimeRoad’s sales figure has been growing 25-30 per cent every month for the past seven month despite no increase in their marketing spend, she adds.  Keeping their vendors interested is a big  win for a company like LimeRoad as it operates on a marketplace model. It’s only logical that vendors are engaged when they sell more. Today, LimeRoad has 450-plus vendors, a big jump from the 25 they began with in October 2012. What’s more—nearly 50 per cent of the products displayed by vendors are exclusively for LimeRoad customers. “The high conversion rate of sales is the reason why vendors have agreed to enter into exclusivity agreement with us,” Mukherjee explains. LimeRoad’s sales figure has been growing 25-30 per cent every month for the past seven month despite no increase in their marketing spend, she adds. 

There are other benefits too—bringing down cost of content creation, for one. “We’re not only able to engage users but also generate content created by them. Most other brands pay for such content creation, informs Mehra. In September 2013, to provide scrapbookers the opportunity to earn from the looks they create, LimeRoad introduced a “create & earn” feature in their business model. Every time someone buys a product from one of the scrapbooks, the creator of that scrapbook would earn a certain percentage of the price of the product sold. Though Mukherjee doesn’t share the exact percentage of earning, she estimates that active scrapbookers can earn up to `10,000-20,000 per month. “Scrapbook is their creation so it is only fair that they should be able to make money out of it.” 

To foster more engagement amongst their scrapbookers and to get others interested, LimeRoad introduced the Style Council. The Council is essentially made up of a group of women who are considered an authority on style such as former Miss India Neha Dhupia, fashion and lifestyle blogger Malini Agarwal of the popular Miss Malini blog, and fashion and lifestyle blogger Gia Kashyap. These women share their styling tips and interact with the scrapbooking community. They also create their own Scrapbook looks and bring in interest from their loyal followership. 

Because of these two new introductions their scrapbook community has seen fast-paced growth in the last six months. It has been growing 40 per cent month on month. They now have 2,50,000 scrapbook looks and 10,000-plus registered scrapbookers. Today, LimeRoad boasts of 26 million page views per month and one million active users. Mukherjee says, “LimeRoad is the top engagement user platform in Indian e-commerce with its registered users growing at 200 per cent month on month.” 

Bejul Somaia, managing director of Lightspeed Advisory Services India, the early stage investor that had invested $5 million in LimeRoad in October 2012 along with Matrix Partners adds, “The LimeRoad team has disproved the notion that Indian users aren’t savvy enough to embrace deep social activities like scrapbooking, curating collections or sharing.”