Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What were good sources of emails for you?

Kiyan Foroughi: Our on-site campaigns are usually the most successful ones. But we had fine-tuned a way with Facebook ads to really get some good subscribers that would activate into good customers. The other thing was partnerships.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing Facebook advertising. Is that what you’re saying?

Kiyan Foroughi: We did Facebook advertising. The other thing was partnerships with some of our affiliates. We were looking inside our affiliates where the best customers were coming from. Those were sites like ShopStyle and all these shopping searching engines. We built >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you meet these two funds?

Kiyan Foruoghi: I knew one of the founders of the first fund. I didn’t know that he had founded this fund because he was the CEO of France’s biggest e-commerce company called PriceMinister. I just reached out to him as an angel investor. He loved the project. He said, “Actually, for the amount that you’re looking for, I’m the founder of this new fund called ISAI. We’re 60 entrepreneurs who put our money into this fund. We invest in Internet businesses founded by French entrepreneurs across the world.” That’s how we met them.

As for the Japanese fund, our launch was covered in Nikkei Business. One of the guys read the article and cold-emailed me. He said, “I really like what you’re doing.” I said, “We’re actually in the middle of closing a round. We have some room left.” They came to London. We met. >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What levels were you able to get to before you raised the convertible notes? There were actually transactions happening on your site?

Kiyan Foroughi: There were transactions happening but we’re talking about single digits daily before the convertible notes. It was still very early. We started seeing more traction, and I can talk about it later as we get to it, down the line.

Sramana Mitra: £250,000 in convertible debt from whom?

Kiyan Foroughi: These were mostly business friends and mentors. I don’t want to say they were friends and family because we didn’t really have any friends and family in there. They were mostly people we knew from the industry. To give you an example, my old bosses at TA invested in the business. Some people were introduced to us like the Head of Digital at Burberry at that time. It was all business angels. These were industry people who we either knew or were introduced to us. >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2010 when you were launching Boticca. Tell me more about how you got this off the ground. What did you launch with? What was the financing around it?

Kiyan Foroughi: I actually launched an alpha version of the website on my own. I’m not a technical guy so I had to work with an agency to develop a very basic alpha version of the website. We got it out there. There was about 30 designers on the platform at launch. Now we have close to 350 brands and designers. That was all out of my own funding. Once I got it out there and saw that it was starting to demonstrate some traction, albeit at a small scale, I recruited a co-founder. We both put money into the business to fund some early hires. The first outside investment that we did was a convertible note round. It was a fairly small round. It was around £250,000.

Sramana Mitra: The £250,000 was aside from you and your co-founder?
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Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do to address that issue?

Kiyan Foroughi: Before I jump into that, there’s one thing I want to add. I told you about my professional background. In terms of my family heritage, I come from a background of jewelry. I’m the fourth generation in the luxury industry on my mother’s side. I’m the third generation when it comes to jewelry. My grandfather was a gemologist. He was an agent for a bunch of luxury brands in Iran before the revolution. I grew up around jewelry specifically. It’s an area I know really well. I spent summers in my grandfather’s workshop learning about the different properties of stones and stone-setting techniques. When I came across this designer, it was very much a perfect marriage between my professional background and my personal heritage.

To answer your question, I went back immediately after this encounter and started doing research. I said to myself, “Surely, there has to be a destination in the web that allows upcoming designers and brands of fashion accessories to sell their products to customers all over the >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 1)

I continue to be interested in how the fashion industry is slowly and surely finding innovative ways to leverage the Internet. Kiyan Foroughi has created a marketplace for fashion accessories that is scaling nicely and helping new designers find a customer base.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Kiyan Foroughi: I’m French-Iranian. I was born in Paris. My parents were immigrants from Iran. I grew up a little bit all over the place. I grew up in France, but I also spent a big part of my childhood in Dubai. We went out there because my father was an architect and he had >>>

Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you want to do with it though? What was the concept? What concept were you trying to execute on?

Trevor Traina: I had observed a number of things after 2008. I had observed that my friends and people I knew were less and less interested in buying more physical things and were directing their spend and time towards experiences — experiential living. What I realized was that while there are many wonderful marketplaces for physical things, there really was not a place where you could go and shop for experience. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to create the first true marketplace for experiences rather than things?”

Sramana Mitra: What would you categorize as an experience?
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Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about what else is strategic in your story of building this company. What other strategic moves have you made that are worth discussing in an interview like this?

Ricky Joshi: One thing I would say is we do nothing normal. Every single thing that we’ve done has been different. Our marketing has been more creative. I don’t mean branding. We’re just smarter about stuff. For example, if you type mattress, you’ll see a bunch of white beds. We put in branded shops with backgrounds that stand out. I’ll give you another example. This is pretty nuanced. The way AdWords works is you set a radius around an area. A lot of times you’re setting LA or New York. But our customer doesn’t necessarily live at the same zip codes. We actually went and took the average home value of a radius around every city and put a modifier on average home value to target zips as opposed to targeting city areas. We do stuff like that all the time.

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