New clothes for Exclusively.in: the flash sales site appears to have pivoted, though it doesn't appear to be a drastic change. The site now offers designer apparel and accessories in a standard e-commerce model, thus discarding the Gilt-like flash-sales/private sales model that it began with. The site is no longer 'members only'. This change comes four months after the company announced a fund raising of $16 million from a clutch of investors - Tiger Global Management, Accel Partners India and Helion Venture Partners. Accel and Helion had previously put $2.8 million in the company in November 2010. Frankly, private sales models don't scale as much as standard e-commerce does, but trying to put a positive spin on the change, Founder and CEO Sunjay Guleria said in a statement - "We saw the future of sales shifting on our site from a members-only to an open site due to an overwhelming demand for our products that short-lived flash sales could not meet. We felt the best way to service that demand was to move away from a consignment model in order to provide fully curated collections with a much broader selection and a full range of sizing to a wider consumer base." Like we said - a positive spin. Exclusively.in is among the many fashion apparel sites in operation in India: there is Info Edge backed 99labels, Smile Interactive and Sequoia Capital backed fashionandyou, the India Today group's bagittoday, little known ThePrivateSales, fetise.com, SAIF Partners backed ZOVI.com, among others.
