How Zilingo cracked the B2B fashion market in south East Asia

Abstract

Zilingo founder, Ms. Ankiti Bose, recognized a substantial untapped opportunity in the South East Asian fashion market as the small offline sellers could not leverage online commerce's power. Zilingo focused on building the supply side value chain by empowering the sellers and helping them in inventory management, integrating multiple currencies and language APIs with payment interface, providing loans and insurance, cataloging, buyback options, sales, pricing, and so forth. Zilingo helped various sellers achieving economies of scale by connecting them with manufacturing vendors in low-labor-cost countries such as Bangladesh. For the B2C, it targeted millennial consumers using shoppable videos, images, creating collections through influencers and celebrities, and leveraging social media such as Snapchat, Instagram. Zilingo realized that the B2B market would help earn higher margins, bulkpurchase from the buyers, long-term and loyal relationships, sustained revenue generation vis-à-vis B2C millennial customers with no brand loyalty and less volume and revenue. Zilingo focused on the B2B market eliminating the commission agents in customs and export departments. This year, Zilingo was planning to expand in the US market with factories in the US and sourcing from Asia. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought that plan to an abrupt halt. Zilingo has cut out 12% of the workforce, rented out the Singapore HQ, and focused more on existing market penetration. As of December 2018, Zilingo's annual revenue is $14.1M, and a net loss is $90.8M. Zilingo is backed by Sequoia, Sofina, Temasek, Burda, among other investors, with the total funding of $308M after the Series D round in February 2019.