Boticca.com — Unique Fashion by Independent Designers

Who?

Hello! I’m Kiyan For­oughi, one of the co-founders (the other is the fab­u­lous Nilo­u­far Sas­sani) behind Boticca.com. Before found­ing Boticca.com, I spent 3 years in the pri­vate equity indus­try at TA Asso­ciates in Lon­don focus­ing my time cov­er­ing tech­nol­ogy and technology-based busi­nesses across Europe. Prior to TA, I spent 2 years as an invest­ment banker in New York at Jef­feries Broad­view com­ing out of uni­ver­sity at Tufts in Boston.

What?

Boticca.com is an online mar­ket­place to dis­cover and buy unique fash­ion acces­sories (jew­ellery, bags, belts, scarves, gloves etc. – no clothes or shoes) from tal­ented inde­pen­dent design­ers world­wide. Fash­ion acces­sories design­ers can sign up, upload their cre­ations and begin sell­ing their prod­ucts on our website.

The idea came from a trip to Mar­rakech, Morocco last Christ­mas where we came across a tal­ented jew­ellery designer in the Med­ina and thought to our­selves, “this designer will never get the world­wide recog­ni­tion she deserves. How about we cre­ate a web­site that will allow tal­ented design­ers to show­case their craft in a pro­fes­sional man­ner to a world­wide audi­ence?”

Why?
When we came back from Mar­rakech, we began research­ing the con­cept and felt there wasn’t a web­site out there truly ded­i­cated to fash­ion acces­sories made by tal­ented inde­pen­dent design­ers. Sure, there are a lot of craft mar­ket­places but buy­ers are sus­cep­ti­ble to com­ing across a lot of “junk”. At Boticca.com, you can expect qual­ity all the time because we pre-approve design­ers before they are able to sell on our web­site.

The name of site comes from bot­ica, an old French provençal word that is at the ori­gin of the word “bou­tique”. Botica.com was already taken by a cyber-squatter who had very high price expec­ta­tions so we just added an extra “c” to it and the name became “Boticca.com”. I actu­ally think the two “c”s make it much cooler!

When?
We launched the web­site on Sep­tem­ber 28^th, 2009. It’s only been a cou­ple of months but the growth has already been quite impres­sive: we launched with a lit­tle under 50 design­ers and 400 items on our mar­ket­place to nearly 100 design­ers and over 1,000 items today!

Where?
Boticca.com is based in Lon­don, United King­dom but the mar­ket­place is truly global. We have design­ers from the United States, UK, India, Thai­land, Iran, Italy, Colum­bia, Brazil, Argentina, Hong Kong, Aus­tralia, South Africa, Esto­nia and Malta to name a few countries.

Our traf­fic is also very global with approx­i­mately 25% of our traf­fic from the US, 25% from the UK, 25% from the rest of Europe, 25% from the rest of the world.

How?
Boticca.com was launched by myself and Nilo­u­far Sas­sani from our apart­ments. We cur­rently work with a team of 3 web devel­op­ers, 3 fash­ion writ­ers, 2 fash­ion video reporters and one web­site mod­er­a­tor. As the busi­ness is doing well, we’re mov­ing into new offices soon and hir­ing a few more peo­ple to exe­cute our ambi­tious busi­ness plan.

Mes­sage to the World
Stand out from the crowd! That’s what we’re all about. You can all go buy the same, tired fash­ion acces­sories that are avail­able at Zara, H&M or Top­Shop but you can rest assured that at least 20 girls in a 5 mile radius of your home will own those very same acces­sories. Boticca.com will allow you to find exclu­sive and one-of-a-kind items that will allow you to truly express your indi­vid­u­al­ity. It’s also a great des­ti­na­tion to make some­one look good by buy­ing a unique gift!

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