Overview
L'occul was a conversational commerce platform catering to Ultra High Net worth Individuals (UHNIs) across multiple lifestyle categories.
We had curated niche luxury brands across India to showcase 7 lifestyle categories (4 product - Clothing, Jewelry, Furniture, Food and 3 service - Travel, Hotels/Spas, Wellness).
We shot curated content for all of these brands and showcased them on our conversational commerce iOS & Android apps along with a selection of their products and services.
1. Offline to Online >>> Concierge Service to Conversational Commerce
I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was thinking that especially for a high value category such as luxury lifestyle items we could start by launching an online platform straight away. In retrospect, what we probably should have done was to launch an offline concierge service first and let the system learn from actual human operators before trying to do conversational commerce.
2. Trust & Reliability: Touch & Feel
Another key mistake we made was that we discounted the touch and feel aspects of high value items. People trust the things they can touch and feel physically, especially if its a Rs. 2,50,000 suit from Raghvendra Rathore. We thought that by shooting high quality video content and showcasing the quality of these brands we might be able to circumvent the touch and feel aspect of things but clearly that wasn't the case! We should instead have focused on building trust and reliability amongst our invite only members by curating the right kind of products for their individual needs via an offline concierge style service first and once they started trusting our choice, gradually make a shift towards a conversational commerce platform later on. That being said, I am still not convinced that one can sell luxury products and services via a conversational platform to begin with!
3. Inclusive Community: Trust
Another key element that we failed on the ability to build an inclusive community of trusted users. Trust, both amongst the users themselves as members of the platform and in the platform itself. We should have established this by getting together users in offline events and gradually get them to start using our services online.
Closing Thoughts
In retrospect, maybe we should have started off by showcasing the goods and a small teaser of our services and exclusive experiences during offline events where our members could touch and feel them and build trust in both us and our offerings to them over time.