YepMe Wants To Fly

Like fish learning to fly, e-commerce companies aren't meant to be brick and mortar retail players. Yet YepMe is pivoting into one, to survive.

India has about 40-65 million online buyers, the target market for all e-commerce companies

After raising $75 million from Khazanah Nasional in September 2015, YepMe started its offline play as an experiment

YepMe wants to expand to about 1400 stores over the next three years

It will take another five years for the current 40-65 million customer base to reach 150 million

Vivek Gaur had given up on India e-commerce story once. As one of the founding members in 2007 of Bagittoday.com, one of the earliest online shopping websites from the India Today Group, Gaur tried everything from flash-sales to a marketplace model. But nothing really clicked. So Gaur eventually moved on a couple of years later.

Having just turned 40, he still had it in him to try something big. Like setting up an e-commerce site, again. But he knew the time was not right. So, he waited. A year later, in 2011, he got together with his IIM batchmate Anand Jadhav and brother-in-law Sandeep Sharma to start YepMe.com, an online-only fashion brand.

AUTHOR

Moulishree Srivastava

Moulishree has over five years of experience in journalism. In her previous assignment, she was a Principal Correspondent for Business Standard where she wrote on technology and telecom. Prior to Business Standard, she was at Mint, where she wrote on various subjects — tourism, hospitality, real estate, science, cyber security and technology. Moulishree graduated as an engineer in Information Technology from Chandigarh Engineering College. She worked as a software engineer briefly but then took a detour and got her journalism degree from IIJNM, Bangalore. She will be based in Bangalore and you can reach her at her [email protected]

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