While the trillion-dollar fashion industry accounts for roughly 4% of the global GDP, its international supply chains are still plagued by outdated technologies, unacceptable labor conditions, and inefficient and environmentally-harmful practices. Zilingo, the rising tech-enabled fashion supply platform, has spent the last four and a half years putting responsibility and transparency at the forefront of fashion’s digital boom. Their goal: “to ensure that the future of fashion belongs to everyone.”
This year, Zilingo Philippines is expanding on that mission with a full suite of new services for MSMEs scaling up their businesses on the platform.
Founded in 2015 by Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor, Zilingo has reimagined the traditionally middlemen-ridden fashion supply chain by creating a single digital platform giving users a transparent view of their businesses as well as access to financial services, product design, and sourcing solutions. They currently have local presence in 11 countries, working with over 60,000 brands and businesses globally.
The cloud-based platform recently secured $226-M in Series D funding, for a total of $308-M dollars in investments from firms including Sequoia, Temasek Holdings, and Draper Venture Network.
“Zilingo aims to re-imagine the supply chain in its entirety and aggregate all parties within the same platform by offering services and software that can help businesses do better, which has been the brand’s focus since day one,” said Shiela Mauricio, Zilingo Philippines’ head of commercial.
With direct access to raw material suppliers, manufacturers, and brands, that platform offers MSMEs can the means to achieve product quality, quantity, availability, and better pricing models. Zilingo Philippines’ new B2B services include:
- Digitization – covering online cataloguing, transactions, and payments
- Fintech – granting access to longer term credit at more reasonable rates
- Hassle-free logistics
- and a new Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform.
“Zilingo first built the B2C platform to help merchants distribute better,” said Ryza Dipatuan, marketing director of Zilingo Philippines. Expanding on their flagship product, ZilingoAsiaMall, these new B2B services promise to solve even more pain points for small businesses.
Ryza says that Zilingo’s fintech and MaaS offerings should be especially exciting for smaller-scale merchants. Using the partner’s existing transaction history on the platform to generate an internal “credit score”, Zilingo has partnered with regional banks to extend credit lines for businesses to “buy now, and pay later.”
For firms looking to launch a new line, Zilingo’s MaaS services offer a cheaper, more efficient alternative to producing collateral in-house.
Let’s say you’re a brand that needs to establish a presence online. “Instead of paying out P50,000 on a photo shoot for your 20 or so SKUs, or products, working with Zilingo allows you to cut that cost down considerably,” Ryza said.
This new cataloguing service charges P100 per SKU (P200 with modeling services), meaning that same P50,000 photo shoot would cost only P4,000 at most. Ryza says the best part is merchants keep the rights to all photos for use in whatever future marketing projects they might have, whether on Zilingo or not. They’re partnering with a number of third party studios to ensure that this service is as accessible as possible for their merchants.
Understanding the variety of challenges faced by MSMEs, Zilingo offers services such as raw material sourcing, HR and productivity software, financial tools, and marketing tools—all with the goal of leveling the playing field of the Philippines’ MSMEs to efficiently operate and compete in the global market.
