E-Commerce Website for Female Apparel Looking for Equity Investor

This is a web-business selling female clothing on the Russian market. We need investment to change our pricing policy and increase sales revenues.

The website exists for 3 months. Everything is ready: We have strong Internet presence, stock storage in Moscow, all contracts established with partners and so on.

This is start-up where the first practical step is made already. Everything is legal and ready to go. We have all the contracts with our partners, namely logistics companies, some fashion designers, the bank, legal service providers, advertisement including social networks (groups) and Russian leading fashion bloggers. We have 80% of the cloths you see on web already on stock in Moscow. Our summer Luna collection is made by our company and being sold on this web-source only. For today the stock consists of up to 200 items which we of course include in the company's selling price.

The web-source is identified by search engines including the Russian top search engine www.yandex.ru. It is also on good position on №1 social network in Russia www.vkontakte.ru. Our web-site is practically open for 3 months now.

The preparation of all of the above, including the new fashion collection production and the web-source creation and so took around half a year. The web-site has one of the best and richest functionalities among competitors on the market. Interested?
The site is in Russian language only but could use other languages as well.
On average we have 100 visitors per day. $0 has been spent for advertisement in the last month and up to $700 USD were spent for advertisement in the first 2 months. When there was advertisement we had up to 2000 visitors per day.

We have no staff apart from the owners. We are just 2 people - me and my wife who is a fashion designer, and we are outsourcing to other companies (legal, delivery companies).

We have sold at a high price ($150-200 USD per item) about 5 items. The prices are really too high - that is a feedback from the customers, as well as our conclusion from the current competitive analysis. We think that the best average price should be $80 USD per item. In China where we used to live and produce our cloths the price is $10-50 USD| per item, i.e. $10-20 USD on average.

Costs for transportation of the goods from China to Moscow are $4 per kg (by land) and $11 per kg (by airplane) including custom clearance. 1 kilo = 2-3 items. Delivery within Russia to the customer is separate from the selling price. All other costs are much less significant at the current stage, before the business has grown. When we grow up, we’d need staff, office and so.

We already have thousands of labels (we produce LUNA under our name), we have companies packages, and so and so in Moscow, as well as and in Thailand (we moved from China to Thailand for living).

Possible scenarios:

1. We can put money into advertisement (up to $10 000 USD) and cut down the prices. Since everything is ready and well positioned all over the Internet – this will multiply sales. Then we should expect organic grow (staff and stuff and so on).

2. We could put much more money, decrease prices and strive at the more ambitious goal of becoming something like asos.com on the Russian market. In this case our main competitors will be: wildberries.ru (they sell mostly very cheap cloths) and kupivip.ru (opened in 2009 and now having 1400 employees and multimillion USD business on the Russian market). The segment still has a room to get in even if competition is growing fast. Also, the market is growing: Now in Moscow around 15% of the women clothing is bought online + it is getting more popular in the other regions as well. In this case we can forget other businesses and work on this project only.

We made our web-source similar to asos.com in terms of functionality. Now Russian customers of asos.com buy and wait up to 2 weeks for delivery - with us they will not wait.

For some private reasons we must move on with other things now, so we can’t spend much time and money on this ecommerce business. Therefore, we are looking for someone who has interest and resources. We want to find a partner (co-owner) or just to sell the business.

We are looking for someone to become our equity partner (in the best case) or purchase the whole business.