T-shirts design crowd-sourcing platform VoxPopClothing secures $400K from Blume Ventures, others

Mumbai-based 21 Trends Pvt Ltd, the company behind VoxPopClothing, a community-driven design platform to crowd source t-shirt designs by individuals across the country, has secured $400,000 in funding from Blume Ventures and a few unnamed investors from India and the US. The capital will be used to expand the team, partner with more brands, scale inventory, and for marketing, VoxPopClothing's founder Siddharth Taparia told Techcricle.in.

An alumnus of Harvard Business School, Taparia had earlier founded another firm called Soundwave Creations. Previously, he was director (studio entertainment) at The Walt Disney Company. In the past, he had also worked at McKinsey & Co. and Deutsche Bank in various roles.

VoxPopClothing is a community that supports brands that are iconic in nature. The collections available on the platform are inspired by popular television shows such as Dexter and The Game of Thrones, among others. The company also designs and sells character t-shirts for brands like Disney, Marvel, DC Comics and Star Trek. The company has also announced in a blog post that it has partnered with Yash Raj Films to create Dhoom 3 inspired t-shirts. The range will be live on VoxPopClothing in the first week of December this year, prior to the release of the movie.

The platform also runs theme-based design contests where users can submit t-shirt designs based on a particular theme to win cash prizes. Users can select from the various t-shirt templates displayed on the site, download it, create a design and upload it to the site. The winning design is then printed and sold on the portal.

"VoxPop is an interactive platform through which we can explore new talents and give them opportunities for creative overflow. We believe that at the core of fashion lies expression and in India, the emerging trend of free expression is growing at a very fast pace amongst the GenY," Taparia said.

Mumbai-based Blume Ventures is an early-stage seed and pre-series A venture fund. It co-invests with other funds and provides seed funding in the range of $50,000 to $300,000 to early-stage tech-focused and tech-enabled ventures. It also provides follow-on investments to its stellar portfolio companies, ranging from $500,000 to $1.5 million. Blume's other e-commerce investments include Bedbathmore, an online furnishing portal; Instamojo, an e-commerce platform for selling digital goods; and Unamia, a portal which focuses on kids apparel.