Everyone can buy Natural & Organic groceries at wholesale price. That is the vision of the Malaysian based startup, Signature Market (signaturemarket.co).
Recently, Signature Market has achieved its amazing results of seed funding raising worth USD $350,000 via PitchIN (pitchin.my) crowd funding platform within a short period of two weeks. Signature Market has acquired 161 investors, the largest num-ber of investors throughout the Malaysian equity crowd funding history.
Signature Market is a natural and organic online grocery. Launched less than two years ago, the startup has been growing fast and is on track for over USD$2 million in annual revenue.
Signature Market cuts out the retail channels and sells directly to consumers, which is why the company is able to offer items that are at a lower price point than retail stores. Signature Market members get 20%-50% off standard retail prices.
With its success of its fundraising, Signature Market focuses on expanding its produc-tion facility and commercial ventures in new markets such as Singapore. As result, more new products and improvements in systems will be introduced to enhance con-sumers shopping experience with Signature Market.
Within the past year, many global brands are jumping on similar platform as Signa-ture Market, direct-to-consumer bandwagon, to compete with monopolistic brands in huge markets due to the advancements in e-commerce and social media platforms.
Brands can now directly communicate with their consumer and gather important da-ta that helps the brand make strategic business decisions.
Recent investments in direct-to-consumer start-ups by consumer packaged goods gi-ants such as Campbell Soup and Unilever are the evidence of new wave. Earlier this year, Campbell invested US$32 million in Habit, direct-to-consumer personalised food and nutrition start-up.
In addition, Unilever has acquired Dollar Shave Club, direct-to-consumer men’s razor start-up, at USD1 billion. The background of these investments stem from the tradi-tional players’ struggle with the direct-to-consumer brand-building at which direct-to-consumer upstarts excel.
Based on such ventures that are coming out more rampantly, it is promising that di-rect-to-consumer will be the new mainstream for significant growth in retail busi-ness, which includes organic products.