WOW STORY OF THE DAY: Three Amazon Alumni Asked Why Fashion Takes 5 Days to Deliver and Built Slikk to Fix It.

Perpule, Amazon, and a Personal Pain Point That Became a Platform

•⁠  ⁠Before setting up Slikk, the founders worked for retail tech startup Perpule, which offered a platform-independent POS machine and cloud-based services to help small offline businesses manage inventories, billing, and customer experience. When Amazon India acquired Perpule, the trio was absorbed and held managerial roles in product and software development. 

•⁠  ⁠Those years inside Amazon gave the three founders a ground-level understanding of exactly how consumer expectation and delivery experience diverged in Indian fashion. They watched shoppers abandon carts because browsing took too long. They saw return cycles drag on for seven to ten days. They understood that the standard three to five day fashion delivery window was a behaviour that consumers had accepted without ever actually wanting it.

•⁠  ⁠"Every time I wanted to make an impulse fashion buy, I'd head offline, not online," Akshay Gulati says. That sentence contained the entire founding thesis.

•⁠  ⁠Slikk launched in August 2024 in Bengaluru. Within one month, the founders had proved enough to attract their first institutional capital.

Dark Stores, Try and Buy, and the 60-Minute Return Cycle

•⁠  ⁠To ensure quick delivery, Slikk relies on a tech-enabled supply chain and a network of dark stores stocked with high-demand SKUs located close to customer clusters. It employs its own delivery agents and groups orders by locality to ensure each delivery partner fulfils multiple requests per trip, keeping both costs and delivery times in check. 

•⁠  ⁠The Try and Buy model is the innovation that separates Slikk from every fashion platform before it. A customer orders. Items arrive within 60 minutes. They try everything on immediately. Whatever does not fit goes back with the delivery agent on the spot. The refund processes within minutes.

•⁠  ⁠"If a customer receives an order in 40 minutes and doesn't like it, they can initiate a return on the app and we'll pick it up within the next 60 minutes. Traditional platforms take 7 to 10 days to complete the full delivery-return-refund cycle. We're compressing that into just 60 to 90 minutes, including the refund," Gulati explains. 

•⁠  ⁠The platform is built around AI-powered hyper-personalisation, where every user's homepage reflects their browsing and transaction history combined with real-time social trend tracking. The catalogue spans 150-plus brands including Snitch, The Souled Store, Freakins, Uptownie, Off Duty, and Bewakoof, with a target of 500 brands by end of 2025. Slikk currently serves approximately 30% of Bengaluru's pin codes and plans to cover 80% in the near term, with Tier 1 and Tier 2 city expansion planned over the next five years across seven-plus lifestyle categories.

Scale and Real-World Impact

•⁠  ⁠Slikk's funding journey in under a year is one of the most compelling in India's 2024-25 startup cohort. In September 2024, the company raised $300,000 in a pre-seed round led by Better Capital with participation from Untitledxyz Ventures. In March 2025, it raised $3.2 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed with participation from Multiply Ventures and angel investors including Abhishek Goyal of Tracxn, Abhinav Pathak of Perpule, Nikhil Bhandarkar of Panthera, Saurabh Gupta of DST Global, and Madhav Tandan. In May 2025, Slikk raised $10 million in Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners with continued participation from Lightspeed. Total funding raised stands at $13.5 million across three rounds. Raising two rounds within two months made Slikk one of the few startups to achieve such rapid consecutive fundraising in 2025. Slikk claims to be growing 2x month-on-month in both sales and order volume, with a majority of the business coming from repeat users and an average order value upwards of ₹2,000. Slikk appointed Sachin Kataria, former Vice President at Nykaa, to head its new Beauty and Personal Care division. India's apparel market is expected to reach $109.45 billion and the beauty and personal care market $34 billion by 2025. The Indian quick commerce market is projected to reach $40 billion by 2030.

The Biggest Opportunities Live in the Gaps Between What Consumers Accept and What They Actually Want

•⁠  ⁠The sharpest lesson from Slikk's journey is this: consumer behaviour that appears settled is often consumer behaviour that has simply run out of better options.

•⁠  ⁠Indian shoppers had accepted three to five day delivery for fashion because nothing faster existed. They had accepted seven to ten day return cycles because the infrastructure for anything quicker had never been built. The moment Slikk showed them 60-minute delivery and same-hour returns, the old expectation evaporated immediately.

•⁠  ⁠"Having watched quick commerce reshape India's consumer behaviour, we firmly believe fashion is the definitive next frontier for digital disruption," said Pratik Poddar, Partner at Nexus Venture Partners. 

•⁠  ⁠Three Amazon alumni asked a simple question: why does fashion take five days when groceries take ten minutes? Then they built the answer. And with 2x month-on-month growth, a repeat-first customer base, and $13.5 million raised in under a year, India's $109 billion fashion market is beginning to feel the speed. 

Sources; YourStory, Inc42 Series A, The Tech Portal, CXOToday, Indian Startup News, Storyboard18, TechStory