Quikr Services makes its second acquisition in the beauty and wellness space, nabs Zapluk
Three months after acquiring Salosa, Quikr Services has now acquired on-demand beauty and wellness services provider Zapluk for an undisclosed amount. With this acquisition, Quikr services will now expand its beauty services brand AtHomeDiva and offer a full range of on-demand home beauty services to consumers in multiple cities including Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Gurgaon and Hyderabad.
Quikr aims to strengthen its position in this niche market. Commenting on this development, PD Sundar, Head of QuikrServices, said:
AtHomeDiva is growing fast and the number of services delivered by our team of trained and professional stylists is growing by more than 100 percent month-on-month. While we are experiencing a high repeat rate, what’s even better is that the average transaction value is increasing steadily for repeat users.
Zapluk is an on-demand mobile app which conveniently discovers and book appointments for beauty and wellness services at a chosen time and location. It was founded by Manan Maheshwari and Mahesh Gogineni in November 2015. The company had acquired Pamperazi in June this year and Lavanya Hariharan, Co-founder of Pamperazi, joined Zapluk.
Post-acquisition, Lavanya and a team of close to 50 stylists will join AtHomeDiva, while Manan, Mahesh and CTO Varun MS will be pursuing other business interests.
“Quikr offers immense scope through its various categories that can be cross-leveraged for the beauty services business. This is a huge step forward for our team and a move that will bring us further fast growth. We are excited to join forces with AtHomeDiva as we continue to bring home beauty services to more people across India,” said Lavanya.
Sector overview
In the beauty services’ marketplace, BigStylist had raised $1 million from Info Edge, the owner of online classifieds Naukri and 99acres, last year. Also, players like ManageMySpa, Mumbai-based Purplle, Nykaa, Stylofie are well-funded and competing in the aforementioned segment.
But, with the ongoing funding crunch, acquisitions in this segment is likely to follow. Some of the recent acquisitions from this sector include Belita’s acquisition by Beauty chain Enrich Salon, Yuvraj Singh-backed Vyomo’s acquisition, among others.
According to YourStory data, about 50 percent of startups in the on-demand beauty space had raised money on a seed level and only Stayglad raised Series A from Bessemer Venture Partners and Anil Chopra, former CEO of Lakme Lever. The online space in this segment is still in the nascent stage and at this juncture, acquisitions by the well-established offline salon chains can turn around the game.
