A very smart e-commerce site has played on our love for everything ‘celebrity’ by offering fashion brands endorsed by Hollywood stars.

In a celebrity-obsessed world, where everything, from your home to your fashion sense is driven by stars, YouCeleb, an e-commerce company has a winning business plan.
YouCeleb is an online, A-list fashion boutique that offers fashion which makes you look and feel like a celebrity. It tracks Hollywood fashion, offers online space to celebrity-worn or endorsed brands and helps you stay on top of the movie fashion trends.
Set up by an Indian American, Amit Dharmani, the e-commerce website offer platform for 20 celebrity-inspired labels, largely from smaller, indie brands who find it difficult to break through the regular retail network.It operates under a group buy model, similar to Groupon’s, and offers a daily deal on a certain item and then sets a minimum number of items that must be sold. YouCeleb’s group buy model allows brands to sell enough of a particular product to make the discounted price financially viable.

Dharmani is a lover of indie labels – before he got down to offering a platform to fashion brands, he had set up an independent record label, the WITNIS project, in 2006 and then a Spanish entertainment company Malianteo, which allows people to log on and listen to music.
The idea to set up a celebrity-driven fashion site occurred to him when, during a NBA Playoff, he realised that he wanted a pair of the stylish sunglasses that Kobe Bryant, an American basket player for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association, was wearing. He scouted online and through different stores for hours for the brand they may belong to, but could not find any. It set him thinking: a site that offers access to brands that sell products endorsed or worn by celebrities, could mean big business. And celebrities, in turn, could donate the proceeds of the sale to a charity of their choice.

 

The startup is a product of Incubate Miami, a science and technology business incubator in downtown Miami that offers strategic resources to entrepreneurs looking to work with an idea. Over time, besides celebrity-endorsed brands, YouCeleb has introduced small and medium sized fashion brands to its repertoire. Among the brands that YouCeleb sells include indie brands like Alice & Trixie, LAmade and Siwy Denim.
The inventory of celebrity-endorsed fashion and other fashion brands is stored in a warehouse in Michigan and distributed from there. It takes about four days for the purchase to reach its consumers. Twice a week, it holds flash sales where it offers a staggering 40 to 60 per cent discount to its consumers, making it a wonderful deal for anyone logging on for a spot of shopping on those days.

Dharmani has claimed that while setting up YouCeleb he followed the Lean Startup concept, a methodology proposed by Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author, in 2011. At the core of the idea is for startups to invest their time into building products or services to meet the needs of early customers in order to avoid market risks and sidestep having to raise large amounts of funding. Dharmani says he has adjusted his product mix and business model often based on customer response. So clued is the start up on customer needs that they often get models to testdrive a limited collection so you can see what you may look like in it.
Celebrity endorsement and collective buying aren’t new trends and YouCeleb is hoping that combining the two in an e-commerce space will be winning combination.