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Entrepreneur Kaizad Hansotia states that his venture GetNatty.Live offers among the first homegrown live video shopping experiences in the country. "We enable partner brands (sellers) to provide an in-store-like online shopping experience for customers on their mobile phones,” he told Parsiana about his company on February 18, 2021. Besides the creation of 15-second short videos called Swirls, the service allows brands to show products and share catalogs. Vendors will have the advantage of not needing to invest in physical spaces, leading to cost advantages, he stated.
In its earlier avatar, the GetNatty Designtech Private Limited, founded in 2016, was a multi-designer online and offline fashion marketplace with over 300 brands and more than 2,000 customers. "With instore and online shopping for high fashion almost at a standstill, operations were derailed,” he rued.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Baroda-based, Hansotia and co-founder Bheshaj Joshi rolled out the first phase of GetNatty.Live in August 2020. "We have over 100 brand partners and 25,000 active shoppers. Brand owners have to pay a monthly charge of between Rs 2,500 and 5,000 to register themselves and use the service.” Emphasizing simplicity of use, he stated the owners of the brands "can just copy-paste the given short code/use plug-in into their existing ecommerce site/app for payments.” Their client list includes names like organic cosmetic company Greenberry, condiment brand BeChef, jewerly brands Zariin and Alto Vida, amongst others.
Shoppers do not need to download an app. They access the videos from any device using an electronic link given by the vendor or by a spokesperson for the brand. Interaction with the brand is possible via text messages and voice notes. Hansotia stated that studies have shown that users spend an average of 11 minutes on their platform. The entrepreneur noted that "one out of every two users end up interacting and further engaging with the brand after seeing the video.”
The challenge for brands will be to create quality video content that appeals to their customers and engage them enough to keep coming back, noted Hansotia. "We are calling this the ‘shoppertainment effect.’ We are speaking to marketing agencies to create video content for our brand partners,” Hansotia told online newsmagazine yourstory.com on January 12.
"As cities get more urbanized and people’s lives get busier, video shopping will grow and it is only a matter of time before video shopping becomes the new normal in retail,” Hansotia predicted. The video service "has the potential to change the retail landscape, especially with very high internet speeds becoming available with 5G telephony,” stated a note from him.
Hansotia foresees that "we will be a million-dollar company in one year.” He estimates that live video shopping will be "more than a USD four billion (INR 38,960 crores) market in India with over 50 million live-streamers by 2025,” he told yourstory.com. Starting in China three years ago, video shopping already makes up more than 10% of ecommerce sales there, he stated.
The entrepreneur has a master’s degree in business management from ICFAI Business School (IBS) and was previously the chief marketing officer of an education technology company Mytestbuddy. Joshi is a software engineer who started a medical technology company. Investors in the company include chairman and managing director of Grihapravesh Buildteck Abhay Kumar and industrialist-investors Binod Choubey, Firoze Sethna, and Parth Patel, Hansotia told yourstory.com.
Hansotia calls his fashion designer sister Dilshad the inspiration for his starting GetNatty. She is a co-director and creative head in the company. Father Kersi is a senior finance executive with Reliance while mother Diana is a self-employed financial advisor. "It would be naive of me to label myself with any tag,” responded Kaizad when asked about whether he is a traditionalist or otherwise in his religious views. "I believe in humanity’s progress and universal peace,” he noted.