Mumbai: Rohit Sharma, the former CEO at Reliance Entertainment-Digital Business, along with Vaibhav Odhekar, former Vice President at Zapak Digital Entertainment, and Sanjeev Singhal, former CTO, Reliance Entertainment (BigFlicks) has launched an online kids toystore Wopshop.com.

“The ecommerce sector is seeing huge growth in India. I have been part of the digital industry for the past 13 years. We had built the third largest toy company as part of Zapak and Reliance and have a strong knowledge of the industry and the suppliers, so we thought we can use this expertise in setting up our own company,” says Rohit Sharma, Co-Founder, Wopshop.com.

The company is targeting the kids in the age group 0-12 years, but as the buyers would be the parents, they are targeting them also, specially the mothers. The company has a headcount of 11 employees over and above the three co-founders.

“I guess the factors that differentiate us from the other companies in the kids’ related ecommerce companies like FirstCry, Babyoye, Hoopos, and others is that they are open catalogue companies, whereas we are a discounts and deals based site. We are also different in the position, look, and feel of our products. Since we already have helped two of the established companies set up their toy stores, he have profound knowledge about the industry and the suppliers,” says Sharma. He estimates that although the other companies have an order size of 1600 to 2000 units per months, the market size is much bigger to accommodate players like them to scale up.

He feels that there is a huge demand as the Indian toy market is very fragmented with about 10-15 percent of organized players in the online and physical toy stores. “Indian consumers are getting high dispensable incomes and are looking forward to get more options in the toys for their kids. There are around 350 million kids in the age group of 0-13 years, and their parents depend on the existing catalogues and brands available to them,” adds Sharma who estimates the toy market at about $1 billion and growing at the rate of 20-25 percent.

Sharma feels that the biggest challenge is to increase the Average Selling Price. He also feels that in the initial four months the challenge was to get the site and dealers ready and estimates that as the company scales there might be challenges in terms of the infrastructure and team size. The company has an office in Mumbai and is looking to open offices across the country as it scales up in terms of its team and warehouse capabilities. The company is bootstrapped by the co-founders and will be looking forward to institutional investors in the upcoming months.