Conscious consumerism set to bolster growth of clean-living marketplaces

OneGreen is the Asia's largest e-commerce marketplace for conscious consumers, who believe in living a healthy life alongside maintaining the balance of nature. OneGreen which started in 2021, is today home to over 500 conscious, pure and safe Indian D2C brands and has impacted more than one lakh customers with 80 per cent of them being women.

In an interview with Bizz Buzz, Neha Gahlaut, Co-founder, OneGreen, says: "Conscious consumerism is set to bolster the growth of clean-living marketplaces since consumers are willing to spend more products that come with a certification of being natural and clean." OneGreen has recently raised $2 million in pre-series funding round from Venture Catalysts.

How was the company conceptualized?

After the birth of our second child, Abhijit and I started transitioning towards a more mindful lifestyle. However, this transition came with its own set of challenges. First was around the fact that there was no one-stop-shop for clean and natural products. Everything including information was scattered and we did not understand whether there was one particular source we could rely on. The second challenge was that there was no platform that offered conscious and safe products. I personally could not trust any existing marketplaces or brands. Since the Indian market was only growing by a single number, launching something like this did not make economic sense at the time. However, in the two years that Covid-19 struck, we saw a massive surge in consumers looking for safer, healthier, and greener options. This massive need to fulfil the existing market gap led to the launch of OneGreen.

What are the products and services the company is offering?

OneGreen has become synonymous with conscious consumerism in India for a good percentage of consumers. There are more than 500 brands and 18,000 products across categories like personal and baby care, groceries, intimate hygiene, sexual wellness, home care, responsible apparel, clothing and more on our platform, making us Asia's largest e-commerce player in this space.

What is OneGreen's USPs and business growth trajectory?

At OneGreen, we have developed a unique proprietary OneGreen index which serves as a three-step quality and credibility measurement model for the ecommerce sector. It has been built and implemented to provide level A assurance, and confidence among customers, who are provided with complete clarity about the credibility of all the products available on platform. We aim to keep advocating and promoting good health and healthy living for everyone and become the singular destination for all things pure, safe and natural. We also have a very clear vision to capture a certain market-share by end of FY24. The idea is to not just build a business but also make India and the society at large, healthy and environment focused.

Do share details on how the funds raised will be used?

We recently raised $2 million in pre-series funding round from Venture Catalysts, India's first integrated incubator and a leading early-stage investment platform for startups. Reputed family offices like Sandhar Technology and some marquee investors such as Shoumyan Biswas (ex-CMO Flipkart, CMO - Tata Digital), Sunil Kamath (CBO, Koo), Varun Duggirala (Founder Glitch), Varun Laul (Board, XpressBees) and strategic investors from BYJU's and other unicorns also participated in the funding round. The funding will enable us to widen our market reach and coverage and provide a platform to brands that are focused on leaving a better planet for our future generations. We have made an impact in the total addressable market worth over 90,000 crore rupees in India, growing at a pace of 70 per cent month-on-month. We will also be working towards strengthening our technology stack and operations fluency.

What are the company's future growth and expansion plans? What are OneGreens market expansion plans?

OneGreen has massive surge plans - both domestic and international. This space of being conscious, green and sustainable is only going to grow in leaps and bounds from here and we intend to ride the wave. Our vision is to become the largest green store globally within a 5-year horizon and the first Indian brand to have a presence and scale across 150 countries catering to health and wellness for individuals and care for the climate and environment.

Please share details on your annual/quarter-on-quarter performance?

We have grown by 170 per cent in the last six months in terms of our revenue. We have had two rounds of funding – a seed round in March 2022 and we just closed our pre-series round last month.

What is the future of clean-living marketplaces in India and what does 2023 have in store for the sector?

There is an increasing awareness among people, especially millennials and Gen Z, about the need to adopt a cleaner lifestyle. This includes the need to know what they consume, the ingredients used, and the impact of all this on the planet.

Conscious consumerism is set to bolster the growth of clean-living marketplaces since consumers are willing to spend more products that come with a certification of being natural and clean. This will be further fuelled by the foray of traditional FMCG into this sector.

Brand like OneGreen have become synonymous with conscious consumerism in India for a good percentage of consumers.

Do share information on your consumer growth trajectory?

Since the launch and from the time we started marketing and brand building for OneGreen around July 2021, we started customer acquisition very strategically, and now have 1,00,000+ customers with very healthy repeats and AOVs. We are scaling very aggressively and we are focusing on top of the funnel. Going forward we want to reach out to more and more conscious consumers and make sure we are visible at all the relevant touch-points. Apart from the hygiene, we will continue to focus on social media as a key driver of awareness and also keep exploring other avenues to reach out to our TG.

What is the market size for this industry?

The Indian clean-tech industry is valued at Rs 90,000 crore, with over 130 million consumers in the country. However, only 30 per cent of the brands comply with their claims of the composition and impact of their products at present. This is a huge opportunity for a platform like OneGreen which showcases only brands that are authentic in their claims of sustainability. Our tech-enabled OneGreen index makes this possible.