Dedicated to the textile and apparel industry, various B2B marketplaces have marked their strong presence in the market and one of them is Geniemode. A one-stop sourcing and supply chain solution company with an innovative technology-based platform for retailers and suppliers, Geniemode is being supported by investors like Tiger Global and Info Edge Ventures which have equipped it with the necessary capital to build a strong tech platform. The company, providing sourcing solution to global buyers ranging from Mom & Pop stores to global giant retailers, is growing at double digit MoM and currently has 300 suppliers and 200 buyers. It is adding 20-30 buyers every month.
In an exclusive discussion with Apparel Resources (AR), Amit Sharma and Tanuj Gangwani, Co-founders of Geniemode said that the company has already achieved US $ 80 million annualised Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) and it is projected to achieve US $ 300 million for the year 2023-24. With faster turnaround time (TAT) and lower minimums, its vendors and retailers have reported average profitability of 15-20 per cent.
The duo strongly believe that B2B marketplaces are here to stay as traditional sourcing is too outdated and broken for today’s fast-paced world. No one has time to send hundreds of emails or make multiple calls for follow-up on any order. Customers nowadays want transparency, quick TAT and digitised procedure.
And Geniemode’s growth underlines the company’s journey so far has been great. “We started with sourcing solutions through technology and went on to offer complete order execution, transparency, quality and pricing transparency to the buyers. We have further expanded our services to design, logistics and payments as well. The ultimate goal is to provide a complete bouquet of services to buyers and suppliers under one umbrella,” said Amit.
The company help retailers and brands by offering the lowest MOQs in the industry and enables fast turnaround by facilitating everything from design to delivery at one place.
And it does so with its tech-based platform, ensuring end-to-end transparency of cost, quality assurance, design library and complete order management including compliance, tracking, inspection, communication, information, storage library and logistics.
Onboard business model
The company starts the onboarding process by presenting its designs which are personalised for every buyer based on their handwriting. “This is our uniqueness – we have a focused approach for each buyer. This is then followed by identifying the right factories, getting the costing closed, TnA plan closure, quality, logistics and payments,” said Amit.
He further added that for buyers, Geniemode acts as their partner to ensure everything is taken care of from design to delivery and they get complete transparency about the same.
As far as suppliers are concerned, it helps them with capacity utilisation, working capital, payment security and consistent demand along with process development and quality improvement through the use of technology.
“On the supply side, we want to take over 50 per cent or more capacity for factories we work with and now we are adding new factories only if they are able to bring in more value which existing factories do not bring in or when we are out of capacity in case of our existing factories,” asserted Tanuj.
Addressing present day pain points
With the market slowdown, costing has become one of the major pain points while finding the right products, factories and quality have already been existing as major challenges for decades. Geniemode intends to solve this through the use of technology. “Our process improvement programmes in factories have shown over 15 per cent cost improvement in many cases resulting in better costing while our TnA and design modules help buyers in solving their other pain points,” stated Tanuj.
All data of Geniemode are hosted on secured Amazon cloud with best of data security practices.
In the Indian textile and apparel industry, many companies have good financial resources, vertically integrated production and enough clients, so they don’t find any reason to work with B2B marketplaces, but Amit is of the view that B2B marketplaces allow manufacturers to easily upload and manage their entire product catalogue while keeping track of all orders and the overall demand of their products in a single online platform.
“With B2B marketplaces, sellers get a single platform for collecting orders, which significantly reduces costs for order processing. It also facilitates getting product feedback and delivery processes in a single place, which helps to respond quickly to any suggestions from their buyers,” emphasized Amit.
Growth trajectory
Along with apparel, the company focuses on home lifestyle goods. Recently it participated in New York Home Fashions Market Week and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair.
Speaking more about the future growth of the company, Tanuj told that the average transaction on Geniemode is US $ 1,00,000. “We currently have US $ 80 million annualised Gross merchandises value (GMV) and are expecting to achieve US $ 300 million for the year 2023-24,” he concluded.
