Our Story
How it all began:
We are the parents of our 5-year-old daughter “Rama”. Rama likes to dress in smart and fashionable outfits and always wants to look like a princess. We explored many shops and online marketplaces to look for the best options that could meet the below criteria:
- Smart, Fashionable and Trendy
- Soft, comfortable and easy to wear
- Reasonably priced and affordable
- Proper fitting
To our surprise, the outfits that were good in quality and fashionable were unreasonably expensive, while others that were affordable were of very basic design as well as the quality of materials used was substandard. Hence, we always end up spending much beyond our budget. It was ridiculous to see that kids' fashion was disproportionately priced compared to branded apparel for adults. The same concerns were voiced by many other parents within our social circle who faced similar problems while shopping for good apparel - be it for a boy or a girl. With this, we started our research to find out the reason for the disproportionate price of kids' wear, and we realized the following factors were the major contributors:
- Greedy sellers who wanted to capitalize on parenting emotions.
- Lack of appropriate quality checks by sellers adds to returns and shipping losses.
- Spending heavily on performance marketing leads to poor ROAS.
- Lack of a proper sizing guide leads to returns and replacements.
- Exorbitant markups to cover up inefficient operations that eventually slow down the sales velocity, causing a pile up of dead inventory.
The story with brick and mortar stores is nothing different. Big retailers are also not able to provide a wide variety due to space constraints, neither are they able to offer better prices due to ever-increasing real estate rentals, employee salaries and low footfall at their stores.
Parents have now started to believe that this is the new normal and are trying to mend their lifestyle or budget to cope with the inflated prices or settle for a lower quality product.
What if we say you can now find the finest products at the most affordable prices at HanselNGretel.in
But how do we manage to do this?
- We aim to minimize the cost overheads arising from returns and replacement by ensuring:
- We only sell curated and handpicked collections to ensure the best quality and comfort for your dear ones.
- Each item we ship goes through several quality checks. You can find our quality checklist on the page: Quality Checklist
- Each design and apparel are measured individually, and size charts are generated. These size charts are not generalized charts based on age groups. We do provide age guidance on size charts for reference, but we would insist our savvy parents and buyers confirm the size charts to ensure a correct fit. This way, we aim to minimize the replacements due to quality or fitting issues.
- We are judicious in our marketing budget and rely on word of mouth from our happy customers to build a long-lasting relationship with parents across India and abroad.
- Streamlined operations using various digital tools and techniques help reduce the overhead cost and help us pass on these benefits to our customers.
- Strong customer support and a parent-oriented thought process helps us connect better with our parents and customers and serve them better.
Inspiration for our brand name HanselNGretel.in:
The brand name is inspired by the story of the brave siblings Hansel and Gretel. Hansel and Gretel, who were deserted in the forest at a very young age by their cruel stepmother, devised clever plans and techniques to fight the wicked witch against all odds. After banishing the witch, they discovered all the treasures in the candy house and returned home to live with their father happily ever after. The witch in our story are the reasons that lead to disproportionate pricing as elaborated above, and we at HanselNGretel.in, using our clever strategies, aim to provide you with the finest products at the most affordable prices so that you shop happily ever after. We aim to be your neighborhood kids boutique for every parenting need. We are an India-based startup that pledge to abide by the Prime Minister’s mission “Vocal for Local” and “Make in Bharat”. We vow to source and sell 100% Made in Bharat goods and help local manufacturers to achieve scale and reach the global market.