Started as a social commerce platform that sold through a network of resellers, Meesho recently ventured into consumer-led commerce, putting it in direct competition with majors like Flipkart and Amazon. Meta-backed Meesho is accelerating the retail of branded products in categories like personal care and electronics, among others.
This social media platform was largely based on selling unbranded products. Now they plan on improving their Direct-to-Consumer brand-based product for Ecommerce. Now, it is looking to capture a larger wallet share by going after “affordable brands” in categories like beauty and electronics.
The category is being called Meesho Brands and the company has already started hiring people for the business through professional networking site LinkedIn to identify brand partners to scale the business. Meesho’s decision to accelerate towards branded products owes to the fact that consumers show more preference to buy them directly from the platform. In reseller-led commerce, consumers tend to also trust the reseller because of their taste in shopping, and not just the ease of buying online. So, there is not much difference between branded and non-branded products.
The Bengaluru-based start-up raised $570 million Series F funding at a valuation of $4.9 billion. This is more than doubled its valuation from the $300 million Series E round that it raised in April 2021. Some of its investors include Prosus Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Meta and B Capital Group, among others. Meesho’s foray into direct commerce is an indication of a larger trend in internet commerce. They see it as a natural transition across industry, where some consumers of reseller-led commerce will keep improving to become direct consumers of e-commerce. They started work on rebranding its logo and moving away from pink to appeal to male users. This is also an attempt to attract men to Meesho, which has been known for women’s apparel till now. And are unlikely to go with blue yellow orange or green as to not copy flipkart and amazon.
