Dapu.com, the latest addition to the Chinese vertical B2C playground which is filled with casualties, reportedly raised US$ 3 million in seed funding, according to Wang Zhiquan, it’s founder and CEO.
Earlier this year, Wang resigned from his post as CEO with Coo8.com, the 3C-centric etailer he founded in 2006 and sold out to Gome in late 2010, and got himself busy for his new cause.
August 28 of this year, a new vertical dubbed Dapu went live. Dapu translates to Grand|Simplicity in English, the branding represents the company’s mindset of providing customers with quality products with simple design. “Dapu is a in-house designed brand that starts with home textile items and sells only online.” Wang once defined so.
For now, bedding, underwear/sock, tower and groceries consisted of the four major categories available on the website, with a highly varied price range of between RMB dozens and tens of hundreds yuan.
official website of Dapu
With emotion-evoking and provocative copy like “returning to roots, environmental caring, enjoying five-star hotel bedding right from your own home and replacing overdesign with simplicity and quality”, Dapu smartly resorts to Chinese people’s rising consumerism and their thirsty for high quality products. It claimed that Dapu is a lifestyle attitude and “safety, simplicity and comfortable” are its core ideas as well as brand differentiation.
Wang said the four categories would just be a starter; they’d expand into other related areas afterwards. Apparently he also realized the current limited categories wouldn’t support the cause to go much further.
2012 is a year that many ecommerce practitioners would want to forget, especially for vertical B2Cs. We’ve seen the downfall of many hypothetically promising verticals, RedBaby, VCotton, Crucco and Letao, to name just a few.
2013 isn’t getting any better for them given insufficient venture capital flow due to global economical backdrop and investors increasing prudence over vertical resulted from the past lessons.