"Our purpose is to help entrepreneurial brands that had been hit since before the pandemic and are now even more so." The person speaking is Nicolás Martinet, CEO of Vindu, "an application for cell phones where what we are looking for is to make a kind of fashion OrdersYa," he explains.
"The clothing industry had been hit hard for a couple of years, but with the pandemic it became much harder," Martinet tells iProUP, adding: "At first this made it difficult for us because we were with small brands that they could not produce or they could not access their production that they already had because it had been left in a warehouse. Once everything began to open up more, the brands understood that they had to sell in an ecommerce channel".
The objective of Vindu is for people to download a single application (available for iOS and Android) where several fashion brands coexist. "This way you don't have to be remembering the link of those you like. It has the differential that as the user follows brands, Vindu recommends others according to their fashion profile," explains the entrepreneur.
"With Vindu, what we also validate is that making an app for a brand is a very expensive investment and it is not justified, because users do not use applications from a single brand. With Vindu you have all the stores in one place. The user also has the possibility of having everything they like in a wishlist that they can leave open so that other friends can see it and thus be able to give you a gift.So they already know what you like, what size and what color and they don't have to walk around without knowing what to buy", describes the CEO.
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According to the entrepreneur, another differential "is that in Vindu the brands configure their Mercado Pago account, so they have 100% control of their payments and merchandise. The idea is to add new collection tools" .
Martinet had the idea seven years ago, "but I didn't give it much more work because it seemed to me that the mobile market was still quite green. We took it up again four years ago when we saw that e-commerce was becoming strong and that people were passing more and more time with the cell phone", he recalls and adds: "We realized that a solution was missing where you could discover entrepreneurial products and brands. Perhaps the closest thing is an Instagram, but that is mixed with the lives of your friends and not shut us down."
Martinet recalls that "four years ago, when we started the project, we received a US$150,000 investment from Friends & Family and with that we put together the team. We had almost two years of development in which we went from forty brands to the eighty that we have today. Now we have just opened a new investment round of US$100,000 with which we want to finish validating our business model. In total we have more than 20,000 downloads in the stores of which 11,000 users remain assets".
The business model is based on charging a commission on the value of each product and there are three plans:
From Vindu they assure that they not only offer their clients an ecommerce platform, but that "with our services we also try to give them communication tools, actions with influencers, dissemination, generating content for the brand. We are also offering the user $500 discount on the first purchase and free shipping nationwide, with the aim of encouraging people to buy through Vindu, get to know us and get to know the brands."
Martinet assures that working in a region like this is extremely stimulating due to the entrepreneurial present in the region: "It is exploding, there are more and more unicorns and investment and we must take advantage of that. I think there is an impressive gray matter with great leaders and entrepreneurs who are role models", he says and concludes: "What is good about this ecosystem is that there are people wanting to help other entrepreneurs and that is what it is aiming for".
