Live commerce foray still a few quarters away: Purplle.com CEO Manish Taneja 

Purplle.com is still a few quarters away from foraying into live commerce even as competing e-commerce companies like Myntra, Flipkart and Amazon have been doubling down on live commerce model, according to Manish Taneja, Co-Founder and CEO, Purplle.com

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Taneja told businessline, “There is a reason to go live if we are broadcasting a real-time football match but I don’t see the urgency for users to watch beauty and personal care content live.” . It makes sense for TikTok to get into live commerce because they have a huge base of daily active users probably running in hundreds of millions and even if a small percentage of that base gets converted it is still a significant number of buyers. 

On the other hand, Purplle’s monthly active users are in the range of 8-9 million and DAUs (daily active users) much lesser. So if only a small percentage of users are going to show up for the live casts, Taneja believes it is not the best use of Purplle’s resources. However, he added that the company has a studio that is ready for producing live videos but the company has just chosen to not invest time and resources in creating live videos at this point. Influencer marketing today makes up about 15 per cent of Purplle’s marketing spend.

On the company’s financial growth, Taneja said, “we are profitable on every order, even post brand marketing, we are profitable. We are only losing money on certain Human Resources (HR) and Selling, General and Administrative Expenses (SG&A) costs which are currently making us unprofitable. We are working towards profitability in two ways - first by consistently increasing our gross margins or take rates every year. The second way is by scaling up our operations a little. If the business grows by about 60 per cent over the next six quarters, we will break even as a company.”

Smaller cities

About 75-80 per cent of Purplle’s revenue comes from outside of metro cities. According to Taneja, cities like Nashik, Ludhiana, Kanpur, and Lucknow are big customer pockets for the company. The average order size on the platform is around ₹900-1,000.

Purplle has five private labels including skincare brand Good Vibes, beauty brands like Faces Canada, NY Bae, and Purplle, along with feminine hygiene brand Carmesi. Other than Faces Canada and Carmesi, the two brands which were acquired by Purplle, all other private labels are not available on any other e-commerce marketplace and are exclusively sold on Purplle.

Currently, 50 per cent of Purplle’s marketplace sales come from owned brands, while third-party brands make up the rest. About 35 per cent of the company’s revenue comes from offline channels, and the rest from online. 

Commenting on offline strategy, Taneja said, “two or three of Purplle’s brands are currently available in top 4,000- 5,000 beauty stores in the country. These could be either general trade stores or modern trade stores or beauty stores. We are not present beyond that. The focus is now on increasing our throughput from these stores and our expectation of revenue from this channel is quite high. The second part of our offline strategy is to start our own stores, as of now, we have seven such stores across Delhi, Jaipur and Bengaluru.”

The seven stores were opened by Purplle in the last quarter and are part of the company’s pilot to understand which size and types of offline stores work well for the brand. Purplle will pause at eight stores and then take further scaling decisions next year depending on how the eight stores work for it.

Taneja also said that Purplle is still about 36-48 months away from listing publicly and is currently focusing on strengthening its processes and corporate governance. Purplle’s direct competitor Nykaa did a public listing last year and has since seen a drop in its market cap.

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