My Dream Store: Start Your Merchandise Business With Zero Investment

Do you have that hidden talent to design beautiful merchandise and apparel? But then how do you showcase your creativity? This post discusses "My Dream Store", a platform that helps you showcase and monetize your creative abilities.

My Dream Store lets you design awesome products and sell them online while it takes care of everything else—from manufacturing the product to packaging, delivery, and even customer service!

My Dream Store - Company Highlights

About My Dream Store and How it Works
My Dream Store - Founders and Team
How was My Dream Store Started
My Dream Store - Startup Challenges
My Dream Store - Business Model and Revenue Model
My Dream Store - Funding and Investors
My Dream Store - Growth

About My Dream Store and How it Works

Based out of Hyderabad, My Dream Store allows people to create and sell products such as T-shirts, hoodies, vests, mobile cases, coffee mugs, and more online with zero inventory and zilch cost. Its platform also provides free design support. My Dream Store has partnered with other vendors to handle demand surges and the manufacture of special products.

My Dream Store is predominantly a crowd-funded merchandising platform. This means that the seller can easily upload his or her designs, create products like T-shirts and hoodies, set the desired pricing and the quantity of items to be printed, and then go on to promote them. When the seller campaign reaches its goal, the platform prints, packs, and delivers the item to the buyers on time and hands over the profits to the seller.

My Dream Store provides the following features:

• Create and Sell – This is for young designers and entrepreneurs who want to step in and solve problems but face barriers of varying degrees while starting an apparel brand. To minimize the overhead expenses on inventory creation, My Dream Store offers such individuals zero inventory and warehousing costs. With added facilities like distribution and packaging, the platform is an aid to the startup ecosystem.
• Create and Buy – This feature is mainly for students who may need T-shirts and other apparel for annual college meets, occasion, groups, and hobby clubs. My Dream Store is a convenient option to solve the tedious process of ordering tees from the traditional vendors.

Relevant Read: FableStreet - Making Tailored Fit Workwear for Women by Using Algorithm

My Dream Store - Founders and Team

My Dream Store was founded by Karthik Venkat and Bala Satish in 2014.

Both Karthik and Bala are NIT Allahabad graduates who left their corporate jobs in 2011 to start a custom merchandise platform called eSparsha; it manufactured customized T-shirts for corporate sessions, college events, etc. The founder duo later jumped into the e-commerce segment to start My Dream Store.

• Karthik Venkat, the CEO of My Dream Store, is an experienced founder with a demonstrated history of working in the internet industry. He is quite skilled in sales, strategic planning, building and running teams. He also is an expert Facebook advertiser!
• Co-founder Bala Satish, the COO of My Dream Store, is motivated to build the best sales accelerator platform to help creators and micro-brands sell their products. He wants to foster an awesome team to assist these creators and brands.

How was My Dream Store Started

Although E-Sparsha (which Karthik and Bala launched after quitting their jobs) had established itself as a reliable service provider for custom merchandising, the idea to explore the e-commerce market caught the attention of the duo which led to the launch of My Dream Store in 2014.

Regarding the initial phase, Karthik quoted, “The initial phase was relatively easy as we had already built a strong vendor network from E-Sparsha. However, getting into the online space and running an E-commerce portal was a different ball game altogether.”

While dealing with online marketing, entrepreneurs have to consider several intricacies to strengthen the strategic pillars and optimize their business operations. The Beta version of My Dream Store was built in September 2014. Since then, the company is working on a way to minimize the risk of over-burdening the inventory by giving sellers access to upbeat scalable technology, efficient and risk-free inventory management, optimized operations, well-defined product, and a seamless marketing strategy.

My Dream Store - Startup Challenges

My Dream Store is based on a ‘bring-your-customer’ model where sellers have to promote their products to the right target audience. However, sellers aren't too aware of modern online advertising tools such as Facebook advertising, Google advertising, etc. To counter this problem, the startup created learning programs on its platform (targeted towards educating the sellers) through an online course-ware called the ‘My Dream Store University’. This initiative by the company helped the sellers improve the success rates of their campaigns.

In addition to the My Dream Store University, My Dream Store has put in efforts to enhance community engagement and overcome various other challenges startups commonly face:

• Campaigner Connect – This is a closed group meant to build a network where buyers and sellers can easily communicate with community managers and solve any hurdles that arise on the way.
• Google Hangout – The creative store has regular hangout sessions where every member of the community reaches out to both existing and potential buyers and sellers for meaningful conversations.
• Open door policy – My Dream Store invites young designers and aspiring entrepreneurs to its office on a regular basis . The My Dream Store team interacts with the visitors and motivates them to join the platform.

Relevant Read: Myntra - Bringing top-notch fashion with every click

My Dream Store - Business Model and Revenue Model

The revenue model of My Dream Store seems quite simple. It charges a standard fee per unit which is based on the type of the product and printing requirements. This fee includes everything ranging from manufacturing cost and packaging to delivery, handling charges, and profit margins.

My Dream Store - Funding and Investors

In 2015, the company received an angel investment of $320K.

My Dream Store - Growth

• More than 820,000 visitors.
• More than 9,000 registered sellers.
• Delivers products to more than 150,000 customers across India.
• A 100% margin on sales on an average.
• A team of 45 employees that continues to grow.
• Extension of its services to Bengaluru, New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and Kolkata.
• Conducts 30,000 transactions per month on an average.

Moving further, My Dream Store plans to venture into other product categories like posters, tote bags, stickers, etc., thereby opening up new opportunities for itself and its partners.

Fast forward to July 2021, My Dream Store has become NOBERO, an online shopping site for men and women.