Renting fashion on-the-go, welcome to flyrobe.com

Shreya Mishra, founder and CEO of Flyrobe.com discusses how and why she started her fashion rental business.

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After completing my engineering from IIT Bombay I worked at prestigious management consulting firm - Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and private equity firm Everstone Capital prior to launching Flyrobe in Jun 2015. 

My co-founders Pranay, Tushar and I are very passionate about the sharing economy - where people need not pay the full price for something they don't use often. Fashion is one such category which has a really low shelf life and in many cases we buy expensive fashion only for one-time use. That’s how the idea of Flyrobe - (we like to call it the 'on-demand wardrobe service',) came about. Women can access a variety in fashion without needing to buy it. We are trying to create a wardrobe service from where women can pick something of their choice whenever they are going out - be it a small dinner, a date, an office party or a wedding! 

In our service three things matter the most - delivering a great outfit, on-time and good fitting. Our collection is super curated. We offer custom-fitting for our ethnic wear collection to ensure fitting, also for our western wear collection we allow users to order a back-up dress. We aim to guarantee a 3 hour delivery - which ensures that women can book from Flyrobe on the go.

Fashion rental is really common in other countries such as the US, UK and Australia, but it’s a relatively new concept in India. Initially there were apprehensions around taking up the challenge of attempting to create a new category of business. But the customer response has been great, it seemed like the time for this idea had come.

We plan to expand to all major cities of India, our next target city is Delhi. We might add a weekly/ monthly fashion subscription vertical in our service, but no immediate plans for that. 

As the CEO of Flyrobe I look after all things business and growth. We are a small team and work cohesively on various aspects of the business - marketing, operations, product, etc. We are constantly working to innovate our service, product and marketing channels. I personally work closely with the marketing and merchandizing teams a lot. 

Here’s a peak into how it works - customers place orders either from our android app or our website and we service their orders from our central warehouse in Mumbai. We deliver hundreds of orders every week across our western wear and ethnic wear categories. 75% of our business comes from women ordering western wear for casual going out event and 25% comes from women ordering ethnic wear for occasions such as weddings, festivals, etc. We take quality control very seriously, and work with international standard dry cleaners to ensure the best results after every use.