Sarojini Digital Marketplace

Sarojini is a physical fashion market in New Delhi selling export surplus and rejected products from local and international brands at low prices. Today, social media influencers are able to purchase Sarojini products and flip them at a much higher price through branding and visibility on social media. 

We want to create a digital platform that would give street vendors the opportunity to capture the additional profit potential of an online presence. This digital marketplace would link street vendors and customers. In addition, we would provide vendor training in branding and trends as well as shipping support. 

Through this solution, informal street vendors can increase their incomes through better access to customers and improved understanding of market trends. Moreover, an online presence has the potential to formalize vendors’ employment status, leaving them less vulnerable to income and political shocks.

In Sarojini, an approximate 4,000 vendors display their wares daily. Sarojini, however, is only a microcosm of the street vendors in New Delhi (approximately 350,000) and in India (an estimated 10 million). Like physical storefronts, these individuals’ businesses have taken a hit with the emergence of online shopping. Moreover, New Delhi’s legal, physical, and socio-cultural environment poses a myriad of risks to street vendors. The difficulty of obtaining licenses leaves these vendors often informal, presenting a unique challenge that leaves them vulnerable to risk of eviction, confiscation of wares and bribery. These risks and vulnerabilities are compounded for female vendors.

Our solution seeks to serve Delhi's street vendors doing business in the retail sector. We plan to use human-centered design methodologies to understand their needs, including legal challenges, informal supply chains, financial access, digital literacy and aspirations of these individuals. In addition, we will undertake user research with potential customers to understand their perceptions and willingness to pay in this context. We will tailor the solution to the needs that we uncover.

We will provide a digital marketplace technology to street vendors, and provide them the support to use it effectively. This support will include training on branding and trends, digital literacy, and shipping. The process will ideally formalize vendors’ employment and connect them to online financial services. We anticipate using proven digital marketplace technologies.

Most innovations are created to benefit the privileged class.This solution taps into the informal sector, providing access to the increased income associated with an online presence. We also provide them the training and skillsets necessary to take advantage of a digital world. Moreover, the solution comes with the positive externalities of formalizing vendors' employment status and improving their access to financial services. This solution would also give visibility to honest informal workers while diverting fast fashion rejects from the landfill.

Our solution is currently in concept phase. We hope to start with a pilot of 30-50 street vendors from Sarojini Market this year, expanding throughout the market and into other markets in New Delhi Capital Region (Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Gurgaon, and Noida) within the next five years.

The initial 1-2 years of our project will comprise research, prototyping and execution. In this first phase, our goal is to understand the landscape and design a solution that fits the needs and realities of the informal retail vendors in New Delhi. Through human-centered design, we aspire to build a solution that provides access to digital marketing technologies with the scaffolding to effectively use them. In our research, we will seek to understand vendors' well-being, challenges and aspirations, keeping an eye to potential linkages so that the digital literacy that our solution provides may also help vendors and their families to access financial, educational, health and other services offered by the government, social and market actors. We will also use data analytics to understand the customer base, which products can succeed in this market and which other products are in demand. Finally, we will approach our research with a gendered lens, to mitigate the vulnerabilities of women vendors and decrease their wage gap.

The scale of informal retail work in India––especially in metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata and cities in New Delhi Capital Region ––ensures a great potential for scale within India. In addition, the solution can be applied to retail informal street vendors in textile-producing countries across South and Southeast Asia. The second phase of our project will look to scale the solution with these markets in mind.

1. Barriers may include legal intricacies around vendors’ business licensing in New Delhi. 

2. Building a pricing strategy that includes a fair margin and acknowledges the tight market may also prove challenging. 

3. India has recently seen the emergence of a multitude of online retail actors selling affordable clothing at scale. Building a solution that can compete with these actors may be difficult.

1. We plan to address bureaucratic hurdles by building synergies with governmental actors using our experience in Indian government and our networks. 

2. We can overcome the pricing challenge by using data analytics to explore market equilibrium pricing. 

3. Our competitive advantage will be in the social branding that our solution brings and the availability of affordable trendy goods.

As we are still in the concept phase, our solution is currently not registered. However, we anticipate a hybrid for-profit and nonprofit model.

We are currently two co-founders enrolled in graduate programs.

We met while working for the University of Chicago's International Innovation Corps, where we served as the Program Management Unit for billion-dollar public-private scheme. Our role creating innovative solutions gave us insight into how to leverage public and private stakeholders to execute and scale program impact. Through our user-centered awareness campaign, we understood the potential and pitfalls of digital media produced for at-risk populations.

Together, we have years of experience in innovative nonprofit service delivery, human-centered design, client servicing, and program management in complex emerging markets. We have a network of social impact leaders and social media influencers in India that can amplify the reach and impact of our solution. We are both purpose-driven and are excited about the potential of this solution to transform lives.

We are currently graduate students at Harvard and MIT, in the Master in Public Administration in International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Master of Science in Engineering and Management in Integrated Design and Management at MIT. These programs train us in the analytic and qualitative strategies to create and manage impactful solutions in emerging markets.

Key Resources:

• Digital platform, brand, funding partners, delivery mechanism, studio for curating online presence

Activities 

• Initial identification and onboarding of vendors, training, marketing, logistical partnership, platform management, payment management, linking vendors with banking system

Intervention

• Digital retail marketplace

Segments

• Beneficiary: Street vendors in informal sector in India
• Customer: Middle and upper income clothing purchasers

Value Proposition

• Beneficiary Value Proposition: Help street vendors achieve online marketing presence and help them to formalize their employment status
• Customer Value Proposition: Provide affordable clothing while supporting social empowerment

Partner & Key Stakeholders

• Logistical partner, street vendors, customers, software developers

Cost Structures

• Staff and online platform

Revenue

• Percentage of transactions

After initial capital, we plan to sustain our business by taking a small service fee on every purchased order.

Funding of US$100,000 would provide the initial capital for our project and be critical to our success. ServiceNow's mentorship on media opportunities and digital platform will help us develop an appropriate product with the competitive advantage. 

We would like to partner with Quicksand based out of New Delhi for human centered design support. We will partner with a software development organization to create a digital platform. A logistical management and support partner will also be necessary to deliver products. Financial service integration for online payments and transfer to vendors will be a key partner in this project.