A cross-border e-commerce platform, StyleWe, announced on Thursday that it has received an angel investment of RMB 15 million (USD 2.3 million) from Lenovo-backed LeFund.
“We will use this round of funding to further optimize StyleWe’s platform and market promotion system, and we will launch our Series A financing in the first half of 2016,” said Yang Xingjian, founder and CEO of StyleWe.
Founded in August 2015 in Beijing, the platform provides high-quality originally-designed fashion products to global consumers through cooperation with independent designers. It established cooperation with designers from more than 300 brands by the end of 2015 and has plans to introduce an additional 2000. By the end of January 2016, the company’s income per month rose to over USD five million.
StyleWe is not operating alone in this market space. Their rival, Biyao.com, was founded in January 2014 by Bi Sheng, former marketing director at Baidu who has close personal ties to Baidu’s founder Robin Li and Xiaomi’s CEO Lei Jun .
Biyao is a pioneer in international C2M (Customer-to-Manufacturer) e-commerce. The company provides customers with independently-designed luxury products at medium and low prices. They achieve this by cutting out middlemen in the supply chain, connecting customers directly with manufacturers.
China’s fast-growing middle class has greatly contributed to the development of these e-commerce platforms. The population of the middle class in China has reached 204 million, accounting for 20.1% of the adult population, according to a survey by the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in 2015.
“We see a new opportunity for consumption in this field brought about by hundreds of millions of middle class around the world,” said Song Chunyu, director and general manager of LeFund, “that’s why we invested in StyleWe.”
(Top photo from nipic.com)
