When Zilingo was established in 2015 with a vision of enabling small sellers in Thailand and Singapore to sell fashion products online, the company made a decision to harness the enormous power of data analytics to enlarge its footprint in the market. Data analytics was deployed for almost every aspect of business, from identifying fashion trends, to filtering suppliers and integrating quality checks.

Today, Zilingo has grown rapidly into a flourishing e-commerce company holding its own against the likes of Zalora and Lazada. In its second year of operation, Zilingo had grown 25% month-on-month and by December 2017, Zilingo had built a significant consumer base with seller hubs in Hong Kong, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and China. The company experienced booming growth, raising US$27 million from funding rounds held in 2015, 2016 and 2017 from investors and growing its team size from just nine people in 2015 to 80 in 2017. From a small setup in Bangkok, the firm had by 2017 expanded to include two offices in Singapore and Bangkok.

Ankiti Bose, the founder and CEO of Zilingo, said, “Initially, we had started with about 100 merchants. For the first few merchants, we had to meet them individually and convince them to try our platform. Interestingly many of these sellers are close-knit and operate on word-of-mouth references. Therefore, when the first few merchants were able to make profits, the rest came to us quite easily. Our platform is intelligent, and now it can predict which seller wants to reach us even before they have actually tried to contact us.”

One of Zilingo’s many success factors included its strong focus on market trends and the company’s emphasis on building data analytics capabilities into its platform. The platform performed comprehensive trend analysis on Instagram posts, hashtags, what other fashion platforms were selling, and other sources like fashion blogs.

In addition, as shared by Bose, “98% of Zilingo customers access our site on mobile, and 83% of our customers are millennials. Ours is a mobile-first online platform. The idea was to create an experience that allowed buyers to shop for products found in malls and street markets from the comfort of their home, and stay up to date with fashion trends around the world.”

Zilingo had satisfied several sources of innovation in entrepreneurship in context to Drucker’s theory of innovation. However, was this enough to keep the company in the growth track? Moreover, was rapid growth the right strategy for the company? Bose knew that her company had fared well so far in a competitive market. However, how could her company further expand its consumer base? What could be Zilingo’s competitive strategy?

This case, written by Reddi Rayalu Kotha, SMU’s Associate Professor of Strategic Management and Academic Director, Master of Science in Innovation and Lipika Bhattacharya, Case Writer from The Centre for Management Practice (CMP) at SMU, looks into the sources of innovation in entrepreneurship and exemplifies how incongruity in an existing market can create avenues for new ventures to be successful. The case also tries to highlight how harnessing the power of data analytics capabilities of an e-commerce platform can help an online business create value-added tools and services for its customers and suppliers.

 To read the case in full, please click here.