The days of labeling women as rampant shopaholics could be numbered – it is men who have been spending their way through the recession according to reports internationally. This begs to ask the question -why are most of the online designer outlets in India today women centric and feature predominantly women’s products?

Retailing in the men’s online space is no longer an “opportunity”- it’s a necessity. Keeping this in mind Fetise.com was formally launched in March 2011 in India to serve this huge gap. The company is a private online destination for men where they can buy apparels, shoes and fashion accessories from top tier international labels. Fetise Retail is backed by Abhishek Shah, who previously co-founded group buying platform WanaMo.com. In November 2009, Wanamo.com was acquired by Germany-based Group Buying Global AG and Smile Interactive group in June 2010 and re-launched as Dealsandyou.com. Some of the international brands that are have already been featured include Ed Hardy, Christian Audiger, Calvin Klein, Gregg Homme, ONE90ONE and several such labels in the pipeline for future discounted sales. The company has different discounted offers for its members on a daily basis, which go up to as much as 80 percent. These offers normally last between 24-72 hours.

Even though the market is a highly competitive one, since the company has concentrated on a very niche segment of that market the competition it faces is comparatively low. “There are several players in this space but most of them are concentrating on women’s products or general products, but we are a through and through men’s fashion postal and so we do not have any major competition,” says Shah. Fetise.com records some 100 transactions daily, with the average transaction amounting to Rs 1500. The site currently boasts of some 50,000 members in less than two months since launch, an overwhelming response by any Indian e-commerce company standards. Fetsie has achieved this enormous growth through word of mouth publicity. “It is like a social commerce site, where a member refers us to his friends, they join and they refer to their friends. This has worked very well for us so far and I believe this model has the potential to take us a long way forward,” he adds.

The company presently has 20 employees and is looking forward to achieve the Rs. 1 crore transactions per month mark in the next three months. Shah also has plans to start women’s and kid’s online fashion outlets under different brands in the future, still Fetise will remain as the umbrella branch and will be men centric.