Zyod, an Indian startup that provides apparel sourcing and manufacturing to fashion brands globally, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture India Partners.
As the e-commerce sector advances, consumers are finding more and more convenience when buying clothes online. However, fashion brands continue to grapple with garment sourcing and production challenges to meet the rapidly growing demands of the industry. These brands face inventory risk as they struggle to stay in sync with consumer trends and preferences, which can lead to inventory write-offs and threaten profitability. Enter Zyod, a tech startup that aims to address these issues.
The Gurugram-based startup claims it can disrupt the apparel industry by offering a new range of products in just 21 days, with a minimum order quantity of just 50 pieces. This is in stark contrast to the traditional supply chain’s 180-day lead time and 2,000-piece minimum order, Zyod co-founder Ankit Jaipuria said in an interview.
“Because of our one-stop service, we do less brand inventory, which is the key winning strategy for any fashion brand in today’s market,” he said.
co-founder of Jaipuria zyod with Ritesh Khandelwal earlier this year, and since its inception, the startup has served a list of more than 150 clients in 13 countries.
He refrained from disclosing specific brands, but said he did reveal the top three customer archetypes Zyod serves. One category consists of smaller direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands that lack alternatives in the current market landscape. International importers and wholesalers who have traditionally relied on Chinese suppliers are now looking for alternatives as companies embrace the China-plus-one strategy to lessen their reliance on Chinese manufacturing. Finally, Jaipuria noted that big brands looking to broaden their product range and take a more demand-oriented approach are also a significant part of Zyod’s clientele.
“We are enabling a very good brand success cycle that in life and everywhere we say, fail fast and learn faster,” he said.
Zyod is not alone in helping solve supply chain constraints for fashion brands in the marketplace. However, other players are operating as offer aggregators in the market, working on floating queries that they receive from the brands to all the providers they have in their networks, according to Jaipuria.
“They’re just adding different vendors and serving the brand, whereas what sets us apart is that we’re actually going deeper into manufacturing, into our manufacturers,” he said.
Zyod is leveraging India’s unique cluster-based supply chain, which extends beyond metropolitan areas and tier 1 cities, to bring its solutions to a larger cohort. By empowering local clothing manufacturers with proprietary technology, the startup is also creating products that can appeal to international brands.
In addition, Zyod uses AI to power a design recommendation engine for brands, providing relevant and personalized designs through a synthesis of objective attributes. This sophisticated approach allows Zyod to provide a more personalized experience to its clientele while improving the efficiency of the design process.
“We have broken down subjective design into objective attributes,” Jaipuria said.
The AI system takes analysis of market trends, brand profiles, and an iterative feedback loop based on the order history of your brand customers to create different style recommendations.
“For a new brand, it could be based on the market analysis and the basic profile once the brand is incorporated. But as he grows with us, we’ll have an iterative feedback loop. Let’s say I offered you 100 styles, of which you selected 20 styles. I will know the attributes of the 20 styles you selected. So, the next offer that I will give you would be based on the attributes of the 20 selected styles”, explained the co-founder.
The seed funding round also saw participation from FJ Labs, Panthera Peak Capital, and angels such as Tracxn co-founder Abhishek Goyal and Oyo global COO Abhinav Sinha.
Zyod plans to deploy fresh funds to refine its solutions. This includes improving the efficiency of its design recommendation engine and advancing its technology to create a fully automated supply chain. The startup is also set to expand the team of more than 45 people, which is based at its headquarters in Gurugram and its branch in Jaipur, by recruiting new talent, Jaipuria said.
