Founded in 2013, Bacca Bucci is a footwear brand owned by Natwar Agrawal from Sikar, Rajasthan. From a single PG room he was staying in in Delhi, he launched the business as a side hustle.
Natwar Agrawal, a young man from Sikar, Rajasthan, started Bacca Bucci, a footwear brand, in 2013, with just Rs 50,000. He launched the business as a side hustle from a single PG room he was staying at in Delhi, with two designs of footwear.
A decade later, Bacca Bucci is making a range of products like sneakers, boots, belts, sports shoes, and colorful sneaker laces, and has achieved a turnover of Rs 66 crore. Initially, they sold about 250 shoes per day, which has now grown to 4,000 daily sales, with the price range of their shoes ranging from Rs 1,500 to Rs. 2,500.
Bacca Bucci’s business model is simple. The product development team first conducts R&D on the shoe and its design. When the prototype is ready and the product has been tested for appearance, durability, and comfort, the company supplies the raw materials to third-party manufacturers for bulk production. 90% of Bacca Bucci’s business is online and only 10% is offline.
Out of the 90% online business, 60% comes from e-commerce marketplaces Amazon, Nykaa, Myntra, Tata Cliq, etc. But within just a few months of starting his job, he launched his footwear business in December 2013, while continuing to work at the firm. “I used to work during the day for the company and kept my evenings for the business.
I used to sleep at 2:00 a.m. after finishing all the business work and then woke up early for the office, barely getting any rest,” says Natwar, reflecting on those early days. “E-commerce platforms were new then, and they didn’t have proper systems to manage customer calls.
However, seeing the positive response to Bacca Bucci, Natwar decided to go full-time into the business in March 2014. In the initial days, Natwar had only one person to help him, a newspaper hawker boy. The duo would pack the shoes at night after finishing their day jobs, and the boy would drop the orders at the courier company’s office the next morning.
Today, the company has grown to 95 employees, including designers, development executives, sales and marketing staff, and social media and website managers. Anuj Nevatia, Bacca Bucci’s co-founder, joined the business in 2014. They were together in the CA program as well; however, Anuj dropped out of the CA course and never completed it.
Natwar, along with his friend Anuj, faced several hurdles in the business. “Some questioned why we, as CA graduates, were ‘wasting’ our degrees by entering the shoe business,” says Natwar. Natwar also borrowed money from his elder sister, who works at an investment firm in Boston, US, and later returned it.
“We didn’t know much about the shoe industry and didn’t realize shoes even had an expiry date,” says Natwar. “After our appearance, we saw a 50x increase in traffic to our website. Since 2013, they have been selling their products only through third-party e-commerce websites.
Bacca Bucci launched its own website only in 2019. “We wanted our own website because platforms like Amazon and Flipkart didn’t share customer data with us,” says Natwar. “We knew customers were reaching us, but we were unaware of their favorite products. So, we decided to develop our own website.”
In 2022, Bacca Bucci ventured into offline sales to test the waters through a multi-brand store in Rohini, Delhi. Anuj handles the marketing and content departments, while Natwar is in charge of product development and finance.
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