Vroooming Beyond The Horizon

TVS accessories, earlier known as Jazzmyride, has been able to completely outperform India’s fledgling startup industry. With a seed capital of just Rs 10,000 by its founders in 2011, the company, now partly owned by TVS Group, has become India’s largest online seller for bike and car accessories. Aiming to clock a topline of Rs 30 crore during this financial year, the Delhi-based firm is on course to achieve the Rs 100 crore mark by the turn of the decade. Already selling more than 10,000 products from 50-plus brands, the company wants to diversify into CV or bicycle accessories in the medium term.

“The zeal to start had been sown about 17 years ago during my school days when I made my first e-commerce sale in 2001 on Baazee.com, later acquired by ebay.com,” says TVSAccessories  co-founder and CEO Sunil Dhingra.

“That sale gave me a kick that e-commerce is a very good business model where the money first comes by the customer and there is no credit to our end (and contrary to) the norm of shopkeeping in those days. Later, I also started selling Micromax mobiles online. I also saw Flipkart and Letsbuy emerge. I did a deepdive research on auto accessory market and realises that I can connect the dots,” he adds.

TVS Accessories has exclusive online and pan India distribution sales rights of some of the marquee international leading brands of car and bike accessories. TVS Accessories (www.TVSA.in) is the largest etail destination of auto accessories and also one of the largest sellers of this category across all leading e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm Mall, eBay, etc.  It is now taking rapid strides by launching its private label products like myTVS brand, which has grown immensely within eight months of its launch and is retailed across more than 1,200 car accessories stores across the country.

The company is covering the entire auto accessories category, be it multi-brand distribution like myTVS, Caberg Helmets, Scoyco Riding gears, etc., multi-channel e-commerce or offline retailing through brick-and-mortar stores.

“Last year’s shake-up of e-commerce industry due to demonetisation and consolidation made us aggressively diversify and we successfully ventured into the offline sales channel through multi-brand retailing and distribution,” says Dhingra. The founders are also drawing up plans to take myTVS branded auto accessories global.

“One of the biggest USPs of our company is the profit focus. We were happy to compromise on unnecessary growth and put the company at a ‘sustainability risk’,” says Dhingra. “Second is the agility that we depicted in changing ourselves whenever the situations and market conditions demanded. We never wanted to change our business model and hence didn’t encourage VCs,” says Dhingra who draws inspiration from N. R. Narayana Murthy, Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos.

As the company is now expanding into distribution (of MyTVS products), it is coming up with a B2B mobile app for selling and retaining platform for retailers particularly. “Offline selling can be transformed digitally as well as technologically using such powerful mobile apps where we would incentivise the retailers to use the app,” says Dhingra on the expansion plans.  

On technology, Dhingra says, “My perspective on technology would be very different from what you have been hearing from retailers. We have been a very ‘Underspending Company’ on technology vis-à-vis a lot of well-funded retailers and e-commerce players who have built the entire technology platforms in-house hiring IIT-ians for the world.  Well, you can be a lean start-up and still use technology,” he says.

The company makes use of SAS-based products for almost all the functions, be it warehousing, POS, accounting, customer care, etc. “That is where we have been able to save huge amounts of costs. We would have never been profitable and sustainable if we had gone for humongous funding,” points out the 33-year-old entrepreneur .

Growth potential: The company has recorded 100 per cent CAGR over the last few years and is poised to grow at a brisk pace.