Styline, the Modest Fashion startup turns one this month. Over the past one year, the startup has grown pretty fast. When Styline, started in April 2015, it was nothing different. There were plenty of e-shops selling hijabs and related products online. However, Styline called itself an exclusive and one-stop online hijab lifestyle shop. While many would not recognize the idea as something disruptive but the timing for Styline was brilliant and it found the product-market fit in no time.
There was [and is] a growing demand for modest lifestyle products in Bangladesh that almost no one saw coming. Styline took the opportunity. Khobaib Chowdhury, who is the founder of the company, previously tried another eCommerce platform called –OnlineKenakata that did not do well. Khobaib wanted to serve a niche market for which online commerce can be a huge convenience. After a lot of research, he observed that the religious female youth of Bangladesh is a huge consumer demographic that is untapped.
The core idea behind Styline was to offer young, stylish and religious Bangladeshi women best quality modest lifestyle products at affordable prices.
In an interview with FS last year, Khobaib said, “Styline is one stop lifestyle solution for Bangladeshi Women who are looking for hijab and modest lifestyle products. The problem we are trying to solve is simple. We see that these women often have to move from one shop to another, one market to another to find right products and designs they are looking for. So what we want to do is: we want to make it simple for these women to find a large array of designs and best quality products in one place.”
Looking back
Growth is central to any startup success. Styline has outgrown many of its contemporaries and shown a consistent growth over the past twelve months. Graduated from Founder Institute, Styline crossed monthly 1000 delivery couple of months ago and remained busy pushing the growth.
While pushing its growth online, the startup also organized multiple offline fairs in Dhaka that received quite a good response. “There is no secret behind this growth as such, said Khobaib, we remained busy with basic: great quality, great service and a lot of time in understanding our customers."
Over the past twelve months, the startup has also gone through numerous struggles and difficulties. "Finding great people is particularly hard," said Khobaib, I have been lucky to have some really dedicated people in my team but people is a consistent problem." Infrastructure for eCommerce is still a major problem for the sector.
We've collected MoM growth data of Styline for you to see how fast the startup has grown over the past twelve months. [these are not absolute numbers and the purpose is to gauge how consistently the startups has grown over the past couple of months]
