Couture Rani screenshot | Source: www.couturerani.com

LONDON, United Kingdom – Earlier this year, BoF announced the launch of Elevator Pitch, a recurring feature that will showcase one exceptional fashion-technology start-up per month and provide valuable feedback from a panel of fashion, technology and investment experts, as well as the BoF community. Today, we are pleased to present our first Elevator Pitch from Gina Mathew, founder of Couture Rani.

THE PITCH

What is your business idea and what problem is it solving?

Couture Rani is an online boutique selling made-to-order luxury bridal and evening wear from India’s top fashion designers. Every year, South Asian women from around the world travel to India and spend thousands of dollars shopping for wedding apparel and jewelry. Despite the barriers of time, convenience and knowledge of where to go and what to buy, they spend in excess of $1,800 to travel to the fashion centers of Mumbai and New Delhi. Shopping in India is not the preferred choice but the only choice because a better alternative does not currently exist. The process is laborious, time consuming and inefficient. Couture Rani provides a solution to this market need by allowing shoppers to order a custom made, individually tailored piece they truly love. The bespoke approach is the standard in Indian fashion retailing. Since most have to travel to India to take advantage of this service, Couture Rani would provide customers this convenience in the privacy of their own homes. While the core business will remain custom made apparel, Couture Rani will add contemporary ready-to-wear apparel to help expand Couture Rani’s customer base from an exclusively South Asian clientele to a more global audience.

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Antique Elevator | Source: elevatorpreservation.com

In our final post in a week of articles on e-commerce innovation, we are pleased to launch Elevator Pitch, a recurring feature on BoF that will showcase one exceptional fashion-technology start-up per month and provide valuable feedback from a panel of fashion, technology and investment experts, as well as the BoF community.

LONDON, United Kingdom – Ever since the early days of BoF, we have taken a keen interest in the exciting emerging activity at the intersection of fashion, technology and entrepreneurship. From the first article we published about Gilt Groupe back in November 2007, when the company had only 5 employees, to our four-part series on FashionStake, which last week announced its acquisition by Fab.com, to our early features on platforms like Pinterest and Tumblr, which have gone on to attract tremendous attention from the fashion community, BoF has a track record for being the first to spot and support the most innovative start-ups making a mark in the fashion space.

As we have examined over the last few days here on BoF, we are currently witnessing a veritable surge of innovation and venture capital interest in the fashion-technology space. Amongst e-commerce start-ups alone, we have seen the emergence of new business models like curation, subscription retail, social merchandising, mass customisation, retail gaming and collaborative consumption.

What business models will be next to emerge? Who will be the next Net-a-Porter, Gilt Groupe or Pinterest? If you have a promising business idea in the fashion-technology space or are already working on a start-up and looking to raise your profile or attract funding, we are putting out a call for your Elevator Pitch: concise pitches that you might give to a potential investor, partner or key hire if you bumped into them in an elevator.

For entrepreneurs wishing to participate, please respond to the questions below for the opportunity to have your pitch featured here on BoF and receive valuable feedback from a panel of fashion, technology and investment experts.

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