Garment Basket (garmentbasket.com)

Bangladesh being the 2nd largest RMG exporter and currently having 4,560 garments industries, the garments sector has become a key player in the country's economy. These garments are producing a lot of RMG of which a good amount is left to be sold in local markets such as excess goods & rejected clothes etc.(known as stock-lot items). 

These stock-lot goods have become the source of livelihood for almost a hundred thousand stock-lot traders. A good amount of these products are also being exported abroad. But, these traders don’t have any unified or dedicated platform to showcase their goods.

GarmentBasket.com started it's journey to solve these problems by bringing the stock-lot traders under one roof so that they discover each other with ease. Our business policy is to work as a mediator among these buyers/sellers and take 5% or less from them on each deal. Thus, let their businesses grow rapidly.

Normally, factories produce 2 to 5% extra garments to reduce final inspection risk which are ending up as stock-lot garments. Currently, apparel industry is contributing to 84% of annual exports which is over USD 32 billion in value. If we consider only 2% of it as stock-lot, it's worth 5400 Cr BDT.

Currently, stock-lot traders are using social networking sites like Facebook, what's-App to showcase their products to their customers which are not organized Marketplaces to do so. And if someone loses track of a desired item it gets pretty hard for him to find it back, because there are no advanced search options(filters,live search options) to find those items easily. Also, there are no records saved to be checked for later usage.

So we've come up with the idea of Garment Basket. Where it works as a mediator between the sellers and buyers. The whole process of transaction between them will be operated under the supervision of Garment Basket. It is completely free for the buyers and suppliers to showcase their products or share their needs. If any successful deal occurs between them garment basket will take a percentage as service charge.

As we're already involved with the stock-lot business for the last 7 years, we've faced the problems first-hand which guided us to build Garment Basket as a solution. Just like us, there are about a hundred thousand stock-lot traders around the country who are also struggling with these issues. 

We've designed our platform focusing on the issues they face in their regular stock-lot trades. Our platform offers free product showcasing, free buyer needs posting, free browsing for products from different sellers. Unlike Facebook/What's App, we have live searching and searching by applying different filters (item/brand/location/gender/price/color etc.). This feature solves the problems of losing track of products in social networking sites. All the users records will be stored in their profile which will help them get a report per week/month of their business-overview / business-growth.

garmentbasket.com is specially designed targeting the garment industry. A seller can post his products which is showcased on the homepage once it gets verified. Similarly, we have an option for the buyers with which they can post their needs with relevant information which will be shown in the 'buyer needs' section. A buyer can show his interest to a product by clicking the 'interested' button and our agents will start processing his interest immediately. We also have real time chatting, real time notifications, live searching, searching applying different filters & some other useful features. 

All the users records will be stored in their profiles. As users make more deals with us we will promote their user levels from regular to bronze, silver, gold and so on and accordingly we will take less percentage as service charge on each deal. We have a feature-rich admin panel for our agents which makes customer support smooth & simple. We are also offering mobile apps for our clients.

Our platform is running on a NodeJS-Express back-end and currently it's deployed into a VPS server. This  combination makes it notably fast and scalable. Unlike many other e-commerce sites, We focused on keeping our interface clean and more user friendly. 

Garment Basket offers the stock-lot traders a dedicated, unified platform to showcase their products, discover new buyers/sellers, thus expand their businesses. Currently, stock-lot traders are using social networking sites e.g. Facebook groups, WhatsApp to showcase their products to their customers which are not organized marketplaces to do so. And if someone loses track of the desired item it gets pretty hard for him to find it back, because there are no advanced search options(filters, live search options) to find those items easily. Also, there are no records saved to be checked for later usage. Garment Basket solves these issues in a way like no-one did. Also, Garment Basket is the only dedicated online-marketplace for the stock-lot traders. 

Normally factories produce 2 to 5% extra garments to reduce final inspection risk which are ending up as stock lot garments. Currently, the apparel industry is contributing to 84 percent of annual exports which is over USD 32 billion in value. If we consider only 2% of it as stock-lot (considering the least possible percentage), it's worth 5400 Cr BDT. Currently, over 1 Lac people of Bangladesh are involved in these businesses. But, the way they do business is challenging, unorganized & insecure. Garment Basket was created with a vision to bring all these traders under one roof so that they discover each-other with ease and expand their businesses faster.

1. As we didn't launch our platform officially we are only having some 50 users now. 

2. After 1 year of launching- around 10,000 users.

3. 30% increment per year. IN 5 years around 24,000 users.

Within the 1st year of launching our goal is to generate users(estimating around 10,000). So, our marketing policies will be set focusing on the concept of gathering as much stock-lot traders as possible under one roof.

Within the next five years our objective will be to maintain consistency of user-generation at a 30% rate per year.  As users make more deals with us we will promote their user levels from regular to bronze ,selver , gold and so on and accordingly we will take less percentage as service charge on each deal. This will encourage them to gradually increase their businesses with us.

We're in need of funding specially for marketing and operational purposes. Our platform is pretty matured from the technical perspective but professional assistance will definitely improve it. We've verified our 'Terms & Conditions' and 'Privacy Policy' through legal advisors.

We are participating in start-up competitions as many as we can for funding. Also we're presenting our idea to local investors. If we can manage the funding we hope we'll be able to overcome marketing or technical barriers that we have.

Full-time: 15

Part-time: 5

As we're already involved with the stock-lot business for the last 7 years, we've faced the problems first-hand which guided us to build Garment Basket as a solution. 

Since, we are working as a mediator in between the buyers and the sellers, we are doing the negotiations on behalf of each side and we take at most 5% of the revenue generated by each of them through a deal, as service charge, from each of the sides. This percentage decreases in course of time, based on the number of deals they make. In terms of cost estimation, if we have 10,000 users and only 2% of them make deals through our platform, then we will have 200 deals per month. If on an average we take BDT 10,000 as service charge per deal, we will have BDT 2 million as revenue, at the end of the month. For overall expenditure, if we spend 50% of that money then, we will end up having 50% as profit, from the revenue that we generated through our business.

Funding and technical support from Tiger IT Foundation for the platform