Romoni: The new household name for beauty services /
Romoni is one of the successful enterprises to avail support from the B-Briddhi programme’s Impact Ready Matching Fund (IRMF) scheme. This is an innovative approach to trigger investments into early-stage enterprises while incentivizing the entrepreneurs like Romoni to stay true to their social mission. How is Romoni becoming the full-stack platform for enabling women-led micro-enterprises in the beauty and lifestyle industries?
Picture: Romoni website
Inception of Romoni
Armin Zaman Khan, the Co-founder and CEO of Romoni, started her journey with a simple motivation fueled by the problem of inaccessibility to credible beauty advisors or experts who could provide decent services at home and save time. With a vision of becoming a one-stop platform for female professionals and micro-entrepreneurs, Armin pivoted Romoni’s business model towards catering to an underserved market, and in due time, grew to become a household name among Bangladeshi women.
With social distancing and movement restrictions becoming a part of everyday life, Romoni continues proving to be instrumental for women in catering to their regular beauty service needs. In the process of working as a complete customer-focused service marketplace, Romoni has laid an impact on creating employment opportunities for women in the beauty industry of Bangladesh. The beauty sector of Bangladesh strives on the labour of skilled but unduly underpaid and unprivileged women, who are, oftentimes, disproportionately exploited by the system, simply because the industry lacks structure in terms of regulation and applied labour law.
Romoni’s mission is to create a solid platform which can enable these skilled women to turn into micro entrepreneurs and, hence earn what they deserve.
Romoni’s Traction and Transition
Founded in the year 2016 as a Facebook Page, Romoni is now a support system for women micro-entrepreneurs in the beauty industry. Initially, each business had its own profile with a service list and booking option, where customers could book appointments directly from Romoni’s site. After a few months, that model of operation had transitioned to a more personalized form where beauty professionals provided services to customers at their homes at reasonable rates.
Currently, Romoni acts in two ways: connecting customers with verified providers of beauty services, and helping those providers improve their standards and access funds from financial institutions for supplies and growth. At the heart of the business priorities are customer service and safety of the beauty service providers. Team Romoni ensures full authenticity of clients by calling and verifying their identity before sending beauty service providers over to their houses. In case of an emergency, the service provider has the option to communicate directly with the team through the Romoni app. Romoni also works towards ensuring a comfortable discourse of beauty-related problems and solutions. The front line of customer service representatives receive hands-on training from renowned skincare and makeup professionals so they can become expert beauty advisors. With a customer retention rate of 75% and a consistent MoM growth rate of 20%, Romoni’s business model displays stellar traction as it continues to cater to customer convenience even through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Romoni’s revenue model runs on commission from B2C home beauty services and B2B beauty product sales. Any beautician can start a business using the “Romoni Partner” app, which lets them create an online profile, keep track of orders, assign work, build a digital financial footprint and enhance their creditworthiness in the long run. They can either enroll themselves as freelance service providers or opt to be an in-house beauty service provider; in both cases receiving hands-on monthly training to improve their service quality, build capacity and expand their business.
Currently, Romoni is working with over 300+ active female beauty service providers, of which 40% belong to the indigenous ethnic minority group.
Apart from receiving hands-on training from beauty experts, service providers get access to proper customer relationship management techniques and advice for best practices which eventually increases customer satisfaction and quality measured by 80% of customer’s net promoter score of 9. Additionally, they also get provisions for small working capital loans which help them scale slowly. This is important as only 7.2% of MSMEs are owned by women and the beauty industry of Bangladesh represents disproportionate employment of extremely poor and marginalized women who are in desperate need of empowerment.
The Market Opportunity
Bangladesh is the 6th largest beauty products consumer market in Muslim countries, with a beauty service industry estimated to be at US$ 3.2 Bn by 2023
The labor force of this industry is primarily women, deprived of opportunities such as: a platform to connect service providers with clients, easy access to finance, a solid place to receive training from, and many more. Having a unique ability to lay an impact on the scaling capacity of a number of, mostly women led, MSMEs gives Romoni the power to address a few very important social problems. Problems entailing a lack of capital and raw materials, exclusion of women from the entrepreneurial ecosystem, continued exploitation of disadvantaged ethnic groups, and a lack of proper business registration and credibility ensuring quality of service provided. With Romoni’s business scope, there is potential to turn these problems into opportunities, such as promoting women’s entrepreneurship through the platform, creating a quality standard for MSMEs in the beauty industry, and even boosting GDP through female participation in the labour force.
Romoni partners with financial institutions to bring these micro-entrepreneurs under the umbrella of financial inclusion. Through Romoni’s fintech platform, micro-entrepreneurs can begin to maintain a structured process of bookkeeping and reach out to financial institutions for help, such as opting for loans. The platform works as a credit facilitator by providing the financial institutions with the data they require in order to embark on the evaluation process before handing out funds, and also, by banking and unbanked segment of the population.
Picture: Romoni signing the IRMF investment agreement with Biniyog Briddhi in March 2021
Opportunities and Challenges
Among Romoni’s prime strengths is the trusted and reliable brand loyalty of its consumers. As Romoni puts customer service as its top priority, customers revert back by showing loyalty and appreciation towards the brand. In addition, Romoni’s team of specialized and experienced beauty experts work efficiently to ensure proper service quality control. They also manufacture salon products with customized in-house formulas, under ‘Romoni Salon Naturals’ giving customers assurance in regards to the quality of the products being used to provide beauty service. There was a demand for at-home beauty services before the pandemic, and with its persistence towards an unforeseeable future, there is potential for greater demand, leaving Romoni with a scope to generate higher revenue given customers to develop a habit and comfort with at-home beauty services.
However, the competitive landscape of Romoni stands a major challenge. Beauty salon stores, global beauty products selling platforms, and microfinance lenders stand as direct competitors of Romoni. There are also new startups operating in the same field, such as Shebaxyz, Shopup, Shajgoj. There is also a lack of recognition of internal brands as compared to large brands.
Investments
Keeping the business scope and opportunities as a stronghold, Romoni has been able to raise investments of almost US$ 250,000 to date in order to expand and collaborate with new brands and improve service quality.
Other than US$ 80,000 in angel investments, the enterprise has also raised US$ 75,000 from Accelerating Asia, an early-stage venture capital fund headquartered in Singapore and US$ 45,000 as a grant from UNCDF, United Nations Capital Development Fund that is dedicated to improving the least developed countries and markets.
Through B-Briddhi programme’s Impact Ready Matching Fund scheme, the enterprise has an opportunity to raise upto US$ 100,000 as non-repayable investment. Currently, they are raising US$ 300,000 to build a proper infrastructure and venture into new industries.
B-Briddhi’s Catalytic Funding Support
Romoni’s far-reaching scope of business has the ability to positively affect the lives of many underprivileged women, who struggle every day to earn their bread and butter, and eventually lay a greater impact in terms of improvement of livelihoods. Biniyog Briddhi’s catalytic funding program aims to help Romoni transition into a properly groomed impact-oriented organization, with the ability to accurately measure impact metrics- primarily, gauging the growth in the number of women being impacted by the platform, measuring the percentage change in the income levels of the micro-entrepreneurs, and improvement in the skill level of the service providers on the basis of customer ratings.
B-Briddhi’s support has helped Romoni in determining the accurate measurement criterion for these metrics and, ultimately measuring the impact left on humanitarian and development segments through data, partnerships, technological upgrade, and new ventures. In addition, B-Briddhi will also award Romoni upto US$ 100,000 to improve its impact metrics and create an impact in society.
Way Forward
Romoni’s growth so far has left a powerful impact on the case of women in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Given the amount of data they are collecting through operation, there is scope to utilize that data to make better-informed business decisions and impactful product and service improvements. The goal, for now, is to become the second-largest beauty service brand and e-commerce platform by 2021. Scale up Romoni Salon Naturals and pilot Romoni branded standardised salons by 2022, and become the largest beauty and salon naturals reseller brand by 2024. The underlying and primary goal remains to be a reliable platform for all things relevant to beauty, lifestyle and more for urban and semi-urban women while being a solid platform for the micro-entrepreneurs to rely on in regard to all things necessary to run a business in the beauty industry of Bangladesh. Being a one-stop platform for the micro-entrepreneurs will make them stick to Romoni and only then will Romoni be able to create a much greater impact.
