Klip it, if you like it

What would you do if you came across a quirky home décor product that you would like to bring to the notice of others online? Simple, you klip it. Yes, klip with a “k” rather than a “c”. And, where would you do it? At, www.klip.in , of course.

klip.in, as its 28-year-old co-founder Harsh Gadia tells you, is a fun place to discover quirky and interesting stuff for your wardrobe or your home. It is meant to be a visual search engine for lifestyle, home décor and fashion products, from different stores and different places.

Harsh, who studied marketing in Mumbai, started a digital marketing agency called Smursh Media, with his friends Sahil Malkani and Maneesh Madambath. Four years of Smursh gave Harsh and Maneesh an idea of the changes taking place in e-commerce. The way e-commerce was being marketed to clients was basically on deals and discounts, he says. They were selling cheap and that is why people were buying. There was no social element to it, he adds. There was nothing in the e-commerce sites for those who just love to browse around, discover interesting stuff, even if they do not always buy them, and share them with like-minded shoppers. “That is when the idea of klip came to us. We need a more holistic shopping experience, more of a community building approach in e-commerce,” says Harsh.

klip, which went through VentureNursery’s accelerator programme, is solving the problem of product discovery, according to Harsh. You want to search for a product, there is Google. You want to compare prices, there are any number of price comparison sites. But, for non-standardised products in fashion and lifestyle, there is hardly anything available. That is the gap klip aims to bridge. “We are targeting women who are looking at fashion as a statement, who love to explore new clothes, new brands of shoes, make up, new home décor items,” says Harsh.

According to Harsh, klip curates a lot of products from other e-commerce sites. One, the site itself curates the products that it comes across.

The other way is for the users to curate the products. Say, someone has seen an interesting mug in a little shop in Bandra, in Mumbai. He or she simply klips it using the klipit button on the site. And, the followers of these can see it on klip.in.

The actual buying does not happen on klip. When you click on the product’s button, it goes to the vendor’s site and the purchasing happens there. klip gets a commission out of these sales. klip has more than 15,000 registered users since it started in September 2013.

About 100 purchases happen through klip, but Harsh says their focus is on getting more registered users.

There are more than two lakh products across fashion, lifestyle and home décor. It has got one round of funding from Mumbai Angels and is looking to raise around ₹6 crore. A mobile app is in the works, as Harsh believes more shopping in future will happen through the mobile.