Founders Everywhere: Shraysi Tandon
Shraysi Tandon is the co-founder and CEO of Kidsy, the leading destination for consumers to shop overstock, open-box and gently used baby and kids items from top brands and retailers.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
If you've ever been a parent or bought anything for a child, you're probably familiar with the fact that kids' stuff can break the bank, and sometimes those clothes or toys barely see the light of day. Kidsy is an ecommerce platform offering high-quality baby and kids items sourced from liquidated inventory with a strong commitment to sustainability and conscious consumerism. Liquidation encompasses a variety of items, including customer returns, overstocked inventory, and unsold clearance items, all of which are discarded in some way. These products, often in pristine condition, present a unique opportunity for savvy shoppers to acquire quality merchandise at significant discounts. By partnering with top brands and retailers, Kidsy not only provides access to affordable products but also helps reduce waste and promote a more environmentally friendly shopping experience.
Co-founder and CEO, Shraysi Tandon is a career business journalist, turned documentary filmmaker, turned startup founder. She has lived and worked all over the world and is currently on the board of two nonprofits, Reelworks and the American India Foundation. Shraysi and co-founder Sinan Sari just announced Kidsy’s $1M pre-seed funding round to fund expansion and innovation and to offer deals and discounts that are light on your wallet and light on the planet!
What inspired you to create Kidsy?
Kidsy stemmed from a personal pain point I encountered as a new mother and also from my background in journalism, particularly my experience documenting child labor in global supply chains. I had learned about the liquidation industry vis-a-vis filming, but never thought I would use that nugget of information until I became pregnant and discovered how difficult it was to access these items for my own personal use. The vast amount of liquidated inventory, worth billions annually, is not being restocked and is shipped overseas or ends up in landfills. This coupled with climate change and all the environmentalists that have thankfully been beating the drum, educating consumers about sustainability and lowering the carbon footprint, created the perfect storm for Kidsy.
What is Kidsy’s mission?
Our mission is to be the number one destination for consumers that are economically conscious, as well as environmentally conscious. We are deliberately in the baby and kids vertical or niche because we find that there's a lot of turnover of products. And as a parent, every few months I find myself replenishing my kids’ items, because they're outgrowing them physically, developmentally, socially, and from a play based perspective. We really want to serve those parents and that community that experience an incredible turnover of inventory within their own homes.
What sets Kidsy apart?
We're relatively swimming in blue ocean territory because we don't have a lot of competitors in the space that are particularly focused on doing liquidated open box, customer returned inventory. There are a lot of P2P marketplaces, but that business model is very different to ours, because they’re relying on individual sellers and consumers. We’re B2B2C and offer items that are coming straight from the manufacturer, straight from the brand, straight from the retailer. We also have a really rigorous inspection process that happens in our warehouse before these items are then resold. And that happens to be for multiple reasons:
We want to protect ourselves as a brand and ensure that what we're selling is exactly as described.
We want to protect the brands that we partner with and make sure there's no brand degradation on their end.
As a consumer-facing company, nothing brings us greater satisfaction than witnessing our customers experience pure joy and delight upon receiving their items.
How does Kidsy inspire “customer love”?
We are better, faster, and cheaper. We're better because all the products are vetted and inspected by our team. We're faster because our shipping turnover time is about 19 hours, while the industry average is 24 hours. We're cheaper because we always try to offer the deepest discounts to our customers on all the products. You would be hard pressed to find an item that is priced lower than us at the condition it's in. Customers reach out to us all the time to say how happy they are to have found us.
What makes you a unique founder?
I operate Kidsy with a completely different lens because I come from a business journalism and investigative documentary filmmaker background. I’m deeply inquisitive and constantly digging deep to find out what are the drivers of the business. A skill I’ve acquired over the years is knowing the right questions to ask to get the right answers that will help scale those learning curves really quickly. I’ve also lived all over the world, which has given me a really global perspective on not just the communities, the people, and the customers that I'm serving and solving for every day, but holistically, on how a business works from start to finish. While I may not have a tech, engineering, or product background, building a startup really boils down to storytelling, which is what I’ve been doing my entire career.
Fun fact: I was born in India, grew up in Indonesia and South Africa and lived in Australia for eight years. I also filmed my documentary in six other countries.
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