DoneByNone : A failure story of an Experienced E-commerce team

E-Commerce is a tough nut to crack. Start-ups which have been surviving so far in the game are the heavily funded ones, notorious for burning investor money and reporting huge losses.

Gurgaon-based web-only women’s fashion brand DoneByNone was backed by early-stage venture capital firm Seedfund, which invested US$2 million in it. DoneByNone had three founders – Amarinder Dhaliwal, Vijesh Sharma, and Vijay Misra – with tons of experience in ecommerce, internet businesses, and technology. Dhaliwal and Sharma were earlier with Bennett, Coleman & Co., and Misra was a former director of the TCNS Clothing Company. They launched the company first as Handspick in February 2011, and a year later, rebranded it as DoneByNone.

But it ran into trouble soon. “We’re a small start-up, and as you can imagine, life has been quite tough for small e-commerce retailers – and we went to hell and hopefully are on our way back from there. While we were focusing on other things that needed solving, we took our eyes off you and your issues. We’ll now work to sort each and every issue you all have. If we've taken an order and haven’t fulfilled it, or have messed up while fulfilling it, we’ll work to set it right. If we can’t fulfil it right, we’ll give you your money back. Promise,” the start-up said on its Facebook page last December. This was the last statement from the company.

The writing was obviously on the wall well before that. In October, the start-up made a rather desperate announcement of 70 percent off all items. DoneByNone had 353,252 fans on Facebook, and going by the feedback of customers on it, the start-up failed to handle the demand or deliver products on time.

Shailesh Vikram Singh, executive director of Seedfund, told TechCircle that the co-founders had quit the company due to challenges in raising further investment. He also said that the company will be relaunching the site with a new team but nothing has been announced so far.

DoneByNone co-founder Amarinder Dhaliwal is now the COO of Micromax’s YU, Vijesh Sharma is on a stealth mode with his new startup, and Vijay Misra’s LinkedIn Page simply says that he was with DoneByNone till August 2014.

Ecommerce in India is a tough space for the smaller players unless they have a clear niche advantage. They can’t match the likes of Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Amazon in sustaining deep discounts to capture the market.