The Yarn Bazaar
India’s first B2B yarn exchange. Post an enquiry, watch the counter-offers land against a countdown, and settle a price per kilo ex-mill without a middleman taking a cut of the conversation.
Overview
The Yarn Bazaar is a B2B yarn marketplace for the textile trade, carrying not just buying and selling but logistics, sampling and seller reviews alongside it. It is the first of its kind in India.
With a vision to digitise yarn trading, the founder of The Yarn Bazaar approached Sphinx Solutions to be their technology partner.
Until 2018 buying and selling yarn was dominated by middlemen, and both sides of a trade had very little control over their own process. What followed from that was ambiguity and mismanagement, in a market worth a great deal of money.
We took on a badly disrupted market with nothing to use as a reference, and built The Yarn Bazaar web and mobile applications so buyers and sellers could deal with each other directly, at any hour, from anywhere.
Their founder Pratik Gadia later took the platform to Shark Tank India and left with Rs 1 crore for 10%, backed by four sharks at once.
The Yarn Bazaar wanted one platform for the whole yarn industry: trading, lending and logistics in the same place.
The real problem was not software. It was breaking an age-old bias towards selling offline, which only happens if what replaces it is trustworthy and does not break.
Traders needed real information to act on: yarn quality, genuine prevailing prices, quantity, and above all the ability to negotiate.
Yarn trading runs on bidding and negotiation, and the client wanted all of it digitised without losing a single one of the touchpoints that make a trade work. We built a framework that carries the lot, with proper user security behind it.
It also had to scale. The platform launched with a limited catalogue and needed to take on new buyers and sellers as demand grew, rather than being rebuilt once it worked.
Sphinx Solutions turned traditional yarn trading into an online B2B marketplace, on web and on both mobile platforms.
It made The Yarn Bazaar the first and foremost B2B yarn marketplace in India, and it attracted buyers and sellers in numbers within a remarkably short time.
“We are very happy to have Sphinx Solutions on board as our technology partner. They understood our business requirements and helped us build an advanced yarn trading application with nothing to use as a reference.”
Tech stack
What people usually ask about The Yarn Bazaar and about building something like it.
It is a marketplace, so it earns on the trade rather than on the yarn: brokerage on transactions that complete through the platform, alongside the lending and logistics services it offers around them.
On the specification and the terms, not the name. Count, fibre, quality grade and colour have to match what you are making, then price per kilo ex-mill, lead time and how the seller has been reviewed by other buyers. A marketplace helps because it puts all of that side by side.
By keeping every touchpoint the offline version had. Offers, counter-offers and revisions all log against the enquiry, both sides can see where they stand, and a countdown gives the whole thing a deadline. Take any of those away and traders go back to the phone.
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